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Dec 28, 2020
Saar announces electoral reform platform
Gideon Saar, head of the Tikva Chadasha (New Hope) party, announced some of the electoral reform agenda his party plans to push.
At the top of the agenda is term limits for Prime Minister.
Saar said he will pass the term limits issue as the first law he will pass, limiting the Prime Minister to two terms.
In a parliamentary system, it is difficult to define two terms, especially when the government, as is in Israel, just about never serves out its full term. In the past two years Netanyahu has served 4 terms. If something similar should happen in the future, a government collapses after a year, twice, is the PM disqualified form running again? he served two terms but only, say, two years.
So a few weeks ago Saar mentioned the term limits as being 8 years. That makes sense. 9 or 10 years would also make sense. I am just pointing out that however it is to be defined, it has to be defined and cannot just be left as "two terms" - not as long as Israel continues with the current form of a parliamentary system.
This is an issue I have brought up in the past, several times. Just because of this I think it is worth considering support for Gideon Saar as PM. The question is if he will really do it. Netanyahu has expressed support in the past for term limits as well, but once he was prime minister he never went ahead with it.
In addition, Saar announced a couple additional aspects of his proposed electoral reform that include making the Members of Knesset more representative of the people. he would do this by electing half the Knesset via regional elections. Those sent to Knesset via regional elections would be more connected to the electorate that sent them and more in tune with their specific issues and concerns. Additionally, Saar would give local government more power at the expense of the national government.
I like the idea of improving the level of representation. I don't have an opinion on strengthening local government over national at this point. I am not sure what the ramifications of that would be.
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I think strengthening local government makes sense - why should so many things be centralized?
ReplyDeleteBeware. When any politician wants to 'improve' the 'level of representation' they mean they think they would get more power (and they can give their cronies more power) this way.
ReplyDeleteI do not know the reasons of Saar but I cannot trust him with this.
Also by changing such a fundamental mechanism as the Knesset elections Israel risks to be more of a mess than it already is. I, for one, can see Bibi changing the system to favor the periphery just some days before an election. And others opposing that. And our miserable state being torn down in the middle.