While folks in D.C. are preparing articles of impeachment, there is election news regarding two of Trumps favorite elected politicians — Bibi Netanyahu and Boris Johnson.

Bibi, like Trump, has been facing investigation for criminal misconduct.  And because Israel permits charges to be filed against a prime minister, he is now actually facing charges.  Meanwhile, Israeli politics are a royal mess.  When there are two or three really strong parties that get most of the votes, proportional representation (or similar systems like the mixed-member system in Germany) can work.  The small parties get to get minor concessions from the major parties, but one of the major parties is typically in a strong enough position to turn to other coalition partners if a potential ally asks for too much.  In Israel, the main parties are simply not strong enough.  Netanyahu’s Likud is only getting around 25% of the vote, leaving them well short of a majority in the Knesset (Israel’s parliament).  And the Labour Party has essentially collapsed leaving centrist politicians to emerge one after the other as the alternative to Likud in new parties that bubble up and then collapse from cycle to cycle.  This past year, that alternative has been the “Blue and White” Party.  But the Blue and White Party has also only gotten around 25% of the vote.  And the remaining parties are too fractured to get enough of them together.  The remaining 50% of the vote is almost split evenly between the religious parties (who want special favors for the ultra-Orthodox), the remnants of Labour and its allies (who want some generally progressive secular government), the right-of-center secular nationalists (who want to repeal the existing special rights of the ultra-Orthodox), and the Arab parties.  This roughly even split means that the natural allies of Likud and Blue and White stood at around 50-52 seats each after the last election.  The secular nationalists could theoretically put either side over the top, but they refuse to sit in a coalition with either the religious parties or the Arab parties (essentially requiring a national unity government as a condition for joining a coalition).

In the April 2019 elections, Likud and Blue and White won 35 seats each (out of 120).  The religious parties combined for 21 seats, leaving a potential Likud-led coalition at 56 seats.  On the other hand, Labour and other progressive parties won a total of 14 seats, leaving a potential Blue and White coalition at 49 seats.  The remaining 15 seats were split between the Arab parties (10 seats) and the secular nationalists (5 seats), meaning that the only way to get to 61 outside of a national unity government would be for the secular nationalist to enter a coalition that either expressly included the religious parties (and the two groups had conflicting demands) or had the implicit support of the Arab parties.  Since neither alternative was acceptable, no government could be formed and we had a second round of elections in September. Continue Reading...