Party systems in Yisrael
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Party systems in Yisrael refers to the party systems that arose with the development of formal political parties in Yisrael in the aftermath of the 1919 Revolution and ratification of the 1920 Constitution. In the first few years of the constitutional order, the country was in a dominant-party system, followed by the development of a 2.5-party system for much of the rest of its political history until the present. For most of its history, Yisrael has had two major parties - the Constitutional Liberal Party and the Royalist Conservative Party - and a multitude of rising and falling third parties.
History
Political parties formally came into existence in the first years of the 1920 Constitution after the absolute monarchy was overthrown in the 1919 Revolution. Pre-revolutionary factions both favoring a modern, less-religious, constitutional monarchy and opposing such a vision manifested themselves into the Constitutional Liberal Party and the Royalist Conservative Party, respectively.
Party systems
The First Party System (1922-1941) emerged after the establishment of a constitutional order and the first general elections in 1922. The constitutional liberal victors of the 1919 revolution organized themselves into a powerful political organization, supported implicitly by the new modernizing monarch and the "spirit of 1919" over much of the populace. The defeated supporters of the fallen absolute monarchy and other political and religious groups and other reactionaries unified into a single, albeit infighting-ridden platform.
The Constitutional Liberals won the newly-created Prime Ministership through solid majorities in the Knesset. They also won a slew of newly-created or electorally reformed District and local offices. Between the early-to-late 1920s, the "Con-Libs," as they quickly became known colloquially, dominated national and provincial politics to such an extent that many seats where the Con-Libs nominated a candidate were considered tantamount to election. The Royalist Conservatives were left to rural and outer-city jurisdictions and religious enclaves. As the two majority parties struggled to figure out the emerging two-party system, a number of more radical parties in the fringes erupted onto the urban scene, carving out a niche of non-mainstream ideologies and political dissent and agitation.
However, by 1926, the Con-Libs began to face voter backlash at the local level, later leading to heavy losses of its overwhelming Knesset majority in the 1928 midterms. The Conservatives won a razor-thin majority in the Knesset and thus won the Prime Minister's office.
The 1930s saw the see-sawing of the Knesset and Prime Ministership between the Con-Libs and Conservatives, battling over foreign-policy disagreements such as the 1932 installation of the Yisraeli protectorate over Gran Aligonia, the Empire of Yisrael policy, and relations with Sydalon as well as new domestic issues, such as the limits of secular expression in a constitutionally-mandated religious society, the political power of the monarch after the limits of 1920, and the centralizing power of the Government of Yisrael.
This era of politics ended with the eruption of the Third West Scipian War in 1941.
The Second Party System (1951-1974) revived the two-party system that had lay dormant in the 1940s during the authoritarian single-party-state of the Autocracy era. The Constitutionalists, who won the three-way civil war in 1951 known as the Year of Blood, reconstituted the the two major parties, though the Conservatives were noticeably weaker as many of its members and supporters had joined or supported the Autocracy regime during the Long Pause. In addition, the moderate-liberal victory brought about a more politically relaxed attitude towards left-wing third-parties that were not associated with the leftist Socialist Front of Yisrael bloc during the civil war. The old Prime Ministership and Arthurista-style parliamentary system was reformed and replaced by a popular-elected presidency constrained with indirect elections through an electoral college.
The old electoral bastions had shifted in many areas; the old rural strongholds of the right-wing Blues had been resettled by left-leaning urban liberals who sought to reclaim the agricultural lifestyle of the 1950s-era labor movement as well as a number of more conservative-aligned Yisraelis who moved for better employment to the cities during the reconstruction in the early 1950s. The Con-Libs subsequently performed well across a large swath of the countryside and parts of the largest cities and industrial areas, while the Conservatives fared better in the inner-suburbs and exurbs of the cities as well as more insular rural regions towards Yisrael's borders and coasts.
The 1950s and early 1960s saw the Con-Libs and their third-party liberal-left allies dominate the presidency and Knesset, but the Conservatives tended to do better in the District and local level. This coincided with a large national political project of devolution and decentralization of the Royal Government in Yerushalayim under the Con-Lib majorities as a backlash towards the centralist tendencies of the Autocracy era; favoring the Blues with increased political power in many areas of government closer to the people. The creation of an electoral college skewed the presidential contests towards the Con-Libs, who were more geographically prevalent across the Districts than the Blues were. During the so-called "Open Fifties," a number of social and liberalizing reforms came into being, including the introduction of a 4.5 workweek in 1955 after extending as a public weekend day the Christian Sabbath on Sundays in addition to the existent Jewish Shabbos (e.g. giving off Sunday as a non-workday for all Yisraelis rather than just Yisraeli Christians who had until then had to request it off from their employers), reducing the Yisraeli workweek instead to Monday morning to Friday noon. Paid time off was established as a public entitlement, and increased three times between 1954 and 1969, and there was an expansion of national parks and preserves to limit development throughout the 1960s due to the emerging environmental movement.
The Conservatives returned to national power briefly in the mid-1960s during the Fourth West Scipian War, but were ousted in 1968 during the debate over the Yarden peace process. The Con-Libs held strong majorities in the Knesset and District legislatures at the end of the 1960s, during which numerous social and fiscal liberal legislation deemed radical was passed or attempted to be passed, engendered a backlash alongside the Yarden and other crises. The Conservatives made major gains in the 1970 midterms due to opposition to the peace process, late-60s liberalism, and religious shifts. Con-Lib President Boaz Benayoun, the initiator of the peace process, won re-elected somewhat comfortably in 1972, but the public souring on the Yarden efforts and an early 1970s recession due to the Jean Succession Crisis cost the political left its credibility. Post-Yarden, the Conservatives won back the presidency and Knesset in back-to-back realignment elections in 1974 and 1976, ending the Second Party System.
The Third Party System (1974-2019) is the immediately-past party system, which was characterized by the Conservatives dominating national politics for much of the next four decades, at least in spirit, as Yisraeli society shifted rightward economically, politically, and religiously in the post-Yarden era. The Conservatives controlled the presidency and Knesset from the mid-1970s until to the late 1980s; from 1988 until 2012, the Conservatives only held the presidency for one unified presidential term in the late 1990s while one- and two-term Con-Lib presidents, mostly moderate, governed the remainder. The Conservatives regained their momentum in the late 2000s and 2010s, recapturing the presidency and Knesset for the end of the Third System. Despite this "book-ending" of the period, the New Right's philosophical ascendancy resulted in more centrist and pro-business Con-Libs - a break in Left Bloc politicians from the 1960s who were considered ideologically ambitious and radical. Many of these triangulating Con-Libs (such as Eitan Herzog) won the presidency with generally center-left policies such as eco-friendly economic development in metropolitan areas and multilateral foreign policy approaches, including strengthening ties across the Periclean region by expanding free trade and bilateral trade deals.
During this era, there were large-scale dismantling of the centralized state-oriented economic regime erected in the 1950s and 1960s, with a wave of privatizations, deregulation, and a more strict and unrelenting attitude towards religious laxity. These moves were most vigorous under the Schwartz-Citron era, slowed significantly during the "Middle Third" Con-Lib era, and picked up some new momentum in the Feldman era again. The Con-Libs, rejecting the changes in Yisraeli society towards a more religious and conservative center of gravity, doubled-down on the Chilonim, even as the share of the Chiloni sectors started to decline in favor of the growing Dati (religious) sectors.
The momentum swung back towards the Blues in the late 2000s and early 2010s, seeing a fusion of political and religious conservatism, commonly called neoconservatism under Noah Feldman. Some of this shift was evidenced by the New Chareidi clique in the major third-party Torah Achdus party, which broke with the transactional, non-ideological, benefits-first ethos of the party's elders in favor of aligning closer with their natural ideological allies on the political right-wing on the cusp of the 2010s. On the Left, in contrast, the ruling philosophical camp of center-left governing was aggressively challenged by insurgent left-wing candidates as the Third System came towards an end. Both realignments quickly sparked the shift towards the current party system.
The current Fourth Party System (2019 - present) came into being with the convergence of the Centrist Revolt, the historic three-way 2020 presidential election, and the unforeseen Hezekian Reaction, which have radically altered the century-long two-and-a-half party system since the 1920 Constitution. Many political historians and analysts have called the 2020 election another realignment wave. Geopolitical and foreign policy issues such as the Gran Aligonian crisis, the civil war in Enyama, and rise of global left-leaning states into the Kiso Pact weigh heavily in political debates.
In April 2021, the Constitutional Liberal Party collapsed entirely, unable to reconcile its increasingly bitter and ideological camps. The center-right and center-left entered into an uneasy alliance in the Alternative for Yisrael-led United Center Bloc, which has emerged as the main competitor to the ruling right-wing Conservatives.
The Conservatives, themselves, have changed form in numerous ways, with some of its center-right defecting to the UCB's Action Yisrael and party leader and President Yitzchok Katz's status as the first Chareidi leader of the historically Masorti/Dati Leumi-led Blues leading to a close alliance between the Blues and Torah Achdus above and beyond occasional alliances or electoral partnerships as in the past. Under Katz, the Chareidi bloc has become an essential pillar in Neoconservatism. Other changes inside the right include an increasingly bitter and contentious fight between the strict pro-Hezekian royalists who favor increased royal say in political affairs and traditional conservatives who believe in the new Monarchy-State constitutional status quo after the "correction" of historical imbalance with the repeal of the Royal Reform Acts.
The Left, after dominating the Second Party system thoroughly as well as seeing its center-left wing dominate politics in the middle third of the Third Party system, is currently deeply out of power. In the past, the Con-Libs being the second major party meant that when the Conservatives overreached, the Left would win in backlash elections as the main alternative; however, in the early years of the Fourth Party system, the consolidated Center group has taken that role, for now limiting the ability of the CLP's successors National Liberal Party and Party of the Left to build a winning coalition. This is in fact a feature of the Fourth system's origins - the revolt of the centrists from both parties took away key consistencies to win a governing coalition, although the Right substituted hemorrhaging centrist support with higher reliance on Chareidi and far right voters. In contrast, the then-Con-Libs relied much more heavily on center-left and centrist voters to win nationally and thus the formation of the United Center Bloc left only a much more leftist core without any obvious substitutes. Analysts believe that the Center may be too fragile to hold as an permanent Loyal Opposition, with openings in the future for perhaps a Nat-Lib-led spring coalition under the right national political conditions.
In early 2022, foreign policy has yet again played a big influence, with the Accords crisis sparking the wholesale electoral collapse of the far-right Northern League in the Yarden River Valley in favor of the centrist/center-right upstart sectarian Yisraeli Christian party Christian Voice, led by the charismatic Elyas Khoury. His upset election and his party's subsequent gains in the Yarden introduced a new political phenomenon: visibly patriotic Yisraeli Christians who are both devout in their faith as well as politically moderate-to-conservative.