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The Israeli left has lost more than an election
From 7 November, but still interesting for those who want to understand Israeli trends, and perhaps ponder a few parallels to America’s. Very long. [IsraelTimes] Israel’s left has been in freefall for 3 decades. It didn’t lose ground in the election; it simply woke up to the mismatch between its political institutions and the electorate.A strange thing happened last Tuesday. As the election results came in, two things became clear. One, Netanyahu’s rightist-religious bloc had won a sweeping, unassailable victory. Two, it had done so without fundamentally changing the actual numbers of votes. Two political parties, progressive-Zionist Meretz and Paleostinian-nationalist Balad, failed to meet the 3.25 percent vote minimum required to enter the Knesset, and so cost the anti-Netanyahu half of Israeli politics about 6% of the total votes cast. Netanyahu’s 64-seat majority is almost entirely a function of that threshold mechanic, which caused the disappearance of well over a quarter-million votes below the cutoff. Posted by: trailing wife 2022-11-14 |
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