Israeli Party Yesh Atid Pushing Bill to Raise Election Threshold
by News Editor
Times of Israel – Israel has seen 33 governments in 65 years, with governments that often last barely half as long as their legally allotted terms. Now, two bills that have garnered the support of the majority coalition in the Knesset aim to do something dramatic about the country’s chronic political instability by making it more difficult to topple a government and strengthening the larger parties through raising the electoral threshold for entering the Knesset.
On Sunday, the Ministerial Committee for Legislation approved one of the bills, proposed by MK Ronen Hoffman (Yesh Atid) and presented at the committee meeting by Finance Minister Yair Lapid, which would raise a party’s threshold for entering the Knesset from the current level of 2% of all votes cast to 4%. That increase would endanger the electoral prospects of smaller parties like Meretz, United Torah Judaism and all of the Arab parties, theoretically strengthening the bargaining position of larger parties.