Addressing a forum as a guest of honor at Lander Institute, former Shas leader and senior government minister Rav Aryeh Deri sent yet another signal that his return to the political arena is only a matter of time.
Deri explained that anyone following the day-to-day activities of the political arena can plainly see the difficulties faced by a prime minister, who rarely succeeds in running the country according to his plan. Therefore, Deri told his audience, the election of the prime minister must be a direct election and not the result of electing a party. The concept is not exactly a novel one, and there was an election in which the prime minister was directly elected, but the makers and shakers of Israeli politics opted to return to the days of old and the direct election process was eliminated.
What really grabbed the audience however was the continuation of Deri’s vision, a vision that closely resembles the American system. For one thing, he advocates that only the prime minister selects his cabinet ministers, professionals in the various fields, professionals with the relevant expertise to address the ministry that s/he heads. Deri is seeking to get away from the current system which permits using the distribution of cabinet seats to various parties, to entice them to join the ruling coalition. This in no way lands the most suitable candidate to head a ministry, which is reflected by the alarming state of many government services.
Deri calls for appointing experts, professionals “who are far from the political scene” to head the various government ministries. He also feels that the current system, which lacks any responsibility by elected officials to constituents must end – calling for regional voting areas, thereby compelling an elected official to become responsible to those who placed him in Knesset.
District voting has long been opposed by chareidim, who feel they will be big losers if such a system becomes reality. Some chareidi MKs who were briefed on Deri’s address later in the week stated such a move would spell the end of the chareidi parties.
(Yechiel Spira – YWN Israel)
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4 Responses
A “direct election” won’t work unless they adopt a strong-president system. The last time they ended up with a left-wing prime minister being elected, but with the right-wing parties controlling the knesset.
A single member system, such as the US has, and especially if the Arabs vote in separate lists, would destroy single-issue parties, including most of the religious, and anti-religious parties and result in a system, similar to the US, in which all candidates have to be sympathetic to religion. It might be good for yiddishkeit, but it would be bad for getting patronage.
If they had multi-member constituencies (several European contries do it), it would probably result in no more than three or four parties getting into the knesset: a left-wing party, a right-wing party, and a Hareidi party. The might be room for one other center-right party.
The reason Israel has a dysfunctional government is that there is no consensus among its people. A single-member system might facilitate consensus. Getting rid of some of the diversity (for example, get the hilonim to go back to Europe) would help.
“for example, get the hilonim to go back to Europe”
I know that akuperma regards himself as some sort of “yiddishe shock jock”, but by writing “get the hilonim to go back to europe” he descends to depths of hate and discrimination previously known only by Adolf Hitler YMS.
That was a truly disgusting thing to say. First Amendment rights aside, he should be placed in ‘cherem venidui’ until he makes teshuvoh for that horrific and horrible statement.
The hilonim desire to have a country that is based on Euro-American culture, and where they can enjoy “Freedom from religion” (unlike the American concept of “Freedom of religion”). They have no desire to be Jews. They never would have come to Eretz Yisrael if they had a choice. Most of the European countries actually miss them. Let them go back and be secularists in secular Europe – and stop messing up Eretz Yisrael with their stus. Eretz Yisrael was given to the Yidden so we could do Mitzvos – and with the warning that if we didn’t we would lose it. Let them go in peace.
I don’t believe akuperma’s comment had any hatred in it at all, as he clarified in the post following his first one.
If Uganda was good enough and the most important part of their dream is to be free (of Torah) and “post-Jewish”, why not be freer in Europe where they can be just as degenerate as their gentile neighbors whose secular culture they so admire and adore, rather than bringing that filth to Eretz Hakodesh?