To Prove He's No Monarch Bibi Must Groom Future Leaders

Hail Bibi, King of Israel.

Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu once again won an Israeli election and will ascend to the premiership.

Israel operates on a Parliamentarian system. The winner, unless their party receives a majority of seats in the parliament — which has never happened — is forced to create a coalition. The Knesset, Israel’s parliament has 120 seats. The magic number for the coalition is 61.

Netanyahu’s coalition will consist of 4 parties. The members of his coalition will be his own Likud party which garnered a whopping 32 seats in this election plus 3 religious parties. Those parties are the Religious Zionist Party with 14 seats, Shas with 11 seats, and United Torah Judaism which brings 7 seats to make the winning team.

These 4 parties, a grand total of 64 out of the 120 Knesset seats, have committed to work together and govern together. And so, voila, Bibi is prime minster again.

In Israel people vote for a party not for a person. The head of the party list that gains the most seats out of the 120 in the Knesset is then asked by the president to form a government. If that party head cannot build his coalition within the prescribed period of time, the president moves on and presents the task to the leader of another party.

This time around it will be an easy coalition to build, an easy decision for the president to make.

Simple math dictates that 61 seats are needed to form a stable coalition. There have been times, however, when a minority government was able to cobble together a smaller coalition and hang on for a short period of time. But the golden rule is that the closer to 60, the less stable the government.

Creating this coalition and then governing with so few parties in the coalition will make the prime minister pf Israel’s role that much easier to be carried out. The more parties in your coalition, the more compromises the leader must make to placate the parties who helped put him or her in position.

Each party, of course, has their own priorities. Each party joins the coalition with a list of demands. Together they sign a coalition agreement and that document, that contract becomes the foundation, the blueprint for the incoming government.

Should Prime Minister Netanyahu sashay out of the boundaries of the written agreement, his coalition partner, or partners, will bolt — and the government falls.

That means new elections.

Over the past few years and several elections, Israel’s coalitions have been very weak. They were composed of too many parties. There were too many divergent priorities. Their fall was inevitable. The question was just how soon after formation would they fall.

Bibi has been out of office for only one election cycle. The previous government ousted him. They created a groundswell of “anyone but Bibi” and it was successful — but only for a year.

In the end, a coalition and political platform united against the opposition candidate is just not enough to keep such variant parties together.

The outgoing government was a political mishmash. It was composed of left wing and right wing and an extreme right wing and an Arab party and a religious party and a staunchly secularist party all jammed together. It was doomed from the outset.

Honestly, I was stunned to see that they were able to stay together for the year.

That is how much they hated Bibi. And in the end, they are right where they started from. In the end, Bibi is back.

This time is nothing like last time. The three partners joining Bibi’s government are all religious parties. Some of their priorities overlap, and those priorities will become the defining characteristics of the new government.

These parties prioritize education and the Jewish nature of Israel. They are all in agreement over housing. The average nonreligious family in Israel has four children. That may come as a shocker to Westerners whose family size is way below zero population growth, or ZPG.

Prepare to be even more shocked.

The average religious family in Israel has 6 children. These parties will demand more affordable housing. And they will demand that those units be built in Judea and Samaria, aka, the West Bank.

All three parties believe in expanding Israel’s presence in the West Bank. And that belief, that conviction, dovetails right into the political philosophy of Netanyahu’s Likud party.

Netanyahu’s victory came easy. This was the fifth Israeli election in 3 years. It was the clearest, the simplest and the easiest to call. Others were nail-bitingly close. This time, there was no need for a recount.

Netanyahu’s victory reveals that Israel is realigning itself. It is now firmly center right. Israeli youth are leaning right, far away from their parents and grandparents who were center left.

The left was hit very hard. It is a phenomenon that we are seeing across Europe.

Netanyahu’s victory proves that there is no one like Bibi in Israeli politics. Netanyahu is more than Israel’s longest serving prime minister. Under his leadership Israel became an economic bullwork, a tech giant and a world leader.

Netanyahu’s victory also proves that there is no one else on the horizon in Israeli leadership. Bibi’s biggest failure is that he has failed to groom a successor. Anyone who came close was forced out by his wife, Sarah.

Not surprisingly, those who were forced out became the very group that successfully galvanized to oust him in the previous election.

Bibi won, hands down. Now he needs to set in motion policies and to groom leaders and to hand the torch to the next generation.

The time has come. Israel has no need for a monarch.