הישראלי לדמוקרטיה- מרץ 2017

day but a collection of people?”
Plesner encourages the parties to leverage
the digital tools available to grow
party engagement on social networks.
This, he says, would drive people to take
part more regularly in the political process,
as voters logging onto Facebook
and Twitter would not only hear from
individual politicians promoting their
personal agendas.
One idea often floated is to raise the vote
threshold for passing entry into the Knesset.
Rahat disagrees.
“THE REMEDY cannot be a higher threshold
- the threshold is now at a moderate
level, and should be kept there because
otherwise it would block important parts of
society from gaining representation in the
Knesset,” Rahat says. “So the level right
now is OK, 3.25%, somewhat moderate,
and you cannot really raise it more than
5% without being too harsh. So this is not
the solution.”
People no longer see
themselves as part
of a party. It’s more
about the personality
of the No. 1
Rahat continues, “Our idea is giving incentives
to political parties and politicians
to run in clear pre-election coalitions. The
idea is that after the election, the prime minister
would be the one who is heading the
list that got the highest percentage of votes.
He or she would be the prime minister unless
there is a coalition of 61 members of
Knesset or more who are ready to support
an alternative designate.”
IDI’s solution to internal party structure issues
would be to hold semi-open primaries.
The parties would receive funding for their
internal elections in exchange for a thorough
regulation. Opening up the parties would enable
a much broader segment of the public to
take part in choosing the party leader and the
list of candidates for the Knesset.
“In this way, future members of Knesset
will not have to be liable to small niche interest
groups, whether its extreme ideological
interests, economic interests or municipal
interests,” says Plesner. “All of these will be
meshed together in a much larger pot.”
More open primaries would require establishing
screening mechanisms to weed out
extremists, such as requiring payment of a
nominal fee and a statement of ideological
affiliation. That would make it difficult for
external opponents to sabotage a candidate
or party from within. Plesner recommends
that primaries for every party be held on the
same day, paid for and run by the General
Election Committee.
The state should also step in and help the
main parties financially, by allocating party
funding so that part of it is designated for
ideological activity and not spent solely
on campaigns. A think tank foundation or
ideological center would be established for
every party above a certain threshold, provided
by the government.
“We see it in Germany, where each party
has an affiliated foundation,” explains Plesner.
“There are very strict rules regarding
Yair Lapid is the single decision maker in
his Yesh Atid party.
the use of their federal dollars. You can’t
spend them on buying off activists. But
they actually have serious research arms,
and they become serious bodies that generate
ideas, debates, they grow leadership –
so they serve some of the really important
roles that parties should serve.”
Plesner says that when Germany started
rebuilding its democracy after World War
II, the country understood that those democratic
institutions could not be taken for
granted, and should be supported.
“As long as you set serious criteria to ensure
that the money is spent properly – and enforce
those criteria – then it is better to provide
public funds. And, it ends up becoming a lot
cheaper than relying on donations for which
someone then owes favors,” says Plesner.
Plesner and Rahat are hoping their reform
recommendations to strengthen political
parties will be applied, thereby reversing
the public’s growing lack of trust in institutions
and political parties. No less than the
continued viability of Israel’s democratic
form of government is at stake.
RONEN ZVULUN / REUTERS
8 DEMOCRACY 3.0 APRIL 2017