2024-23 The Middle East
Thursday, October 17, 2024 Israel, Tel Aviv often tells us, is the only democracy in the Middle East. Its population, parliament and cabinet are respectively, 20%, 10% and 0% Arab. Is this democracy?
It’s majority rule in which, apparently, 50% + 1 will do. Netanyahu had a majority of just one in 2015. The UK’s Tories passed this 50% threshold with some Unionists in 2017, as did Labour in 1978; the Austrians did it with the Freedom Party in 1999, as too the Dutch with a namesake in 2010. But in Israel, the current, extreme right-wing majority coalition is (not the but) a cause of war!
Not only in Israel but right across Europe, the extreme right is successful, electorally. But in reality? Consider this: voters have preferences, so in Belfast for example, many DUP voters doubtless prefer the UUP to SF, and many SF supporters the SDLP to the DUP. But extremist parties don’t like preferential systems; in the main, it is the centre ground – Alliance, GP, SDLP and UUP, etc. – who cross the party divides.
But votes can be accurate only if they include party preferences. In the Dutch 2023 general election - single-preference PR - on a ballot paper with over 1,000 candidates, voters could choose just one candidate: this one ‘good’, all the others, all equally, seemingly, ‘not good’. So most or all of these votes were inaccurate. The count therefore, the collation of all this inaccurate data, was almost definitely inaccurate as well, yet it implied that Geert Wilders was the most popular. Similarly, the recent EU elections - in which every country has a form of PR - also suggested the extreme right was very popular, especially in those countries, like France and Germany, with a single-preference system.
(Switzerland, and) former conflict zones often have, not only PR elections, but also all-party, power-sharing. To suggest a party of 30, 40… 49% should not have a role in government because of majority rule, runs the risk that, when its ‘popularity’ does pass 50%, this extremist party will take over, completely! In 1933, Hitler’s Enabling Act was a (weighted) majority vote.
Surely, democracy in Dublin, London, Tel Aviv and elsewhere, should include (a) a preferential PR electoral system - the current Israeli system is also single-preference PR; (b) multi-option decision-making (as befits a multi-party chamber); and (c) a form of all-party governance. To take the Dutch example again, in 2023, the PVV won 25% of the seats in parliament, so it would have an influence of 25% in an all-party cabinet; under majority rule, however, in the current four-party majority coalition, it has a 42% influence!
So we should change our politics, if only for the sake of peace in the Middle East. And let’s be honest: majority rule could not work in the absolute ideal, a one-state Israel/Palestine solution; secondly, it would not work well in a two-state solution, forever provoking the more belligerent to out-number their more moderate rivals. Granted, it might be difficult to work with SF in Dublin, the PVV in The Hague, the AfD in Berlin, and so on, in France, Austria, Portugal etc., but it would be more difficult in the Middle East, and maybe this is the price of peace.
