Opinion | Leadership Restriction Act Israel today

What do Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, Tony Blair and Angela Merkel have in common?

They were prime ministers of Britain, the mother of modern parliamentary democracy, and of Germany, a stable parliamentary democracy whose past had caused it to surround itself with constitutional security from slipping into a dictatorship.

All of them have served in recent decades for longer than Justice Minister Gideon Saar proposes to budget for the future Israeli prime minister (eight years).

Thatcher served 11 years in Britain (1990-1979) and caused a socio-economic revolution, for better or worse. Kohl served 16 years in Germany (1998-1982). He successfully led the perilous historic Union with Communist Germany, and was one of the founding leaders of the European Union. His successors, Gerhard Schroeder (seven years in office) and Angela Merkel (15 years) continued to establish his enterprises. Tony Blair served 10 years as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (2007-2007). He removed the Labor Party from an electoral pit, brought an end to the Northern Ireland Civil War and continued the structural changes of Thatcher and heir John Major.

Parliamentary democracy in Germany and the United Kingdom in recent decades has been characterized by great stability and the ability to adapt to changes and bring about substantial reforms.

This is what we want from the rule of the people: stability, but also the ability to bring about change;

Adequate representation and governance for those elected to enforce the will of the people on the officers and bureaucracies.

There was no difficulty in replacing the two founding leaders of the period - when the voters (Kohl) or the ruling party (Thatcher) wanted it.

Thus, Saar's substantive or regime arguments for restricting the priesthood do not hold water.

While powerful elected officials may do damage to their country, just as they may benefit it, no regime will thwart the damage of a failed leadership.

Therefore, when we choose leaders, we have a heavy responsibility.

No law will remove it from us.

By itself, a strong prime minister is not a threat to the democratic regime, and he may even be a strategic asset to his country.

David Ben-Gurion is our most prominent example.

According to Saar, it would have been better for a failed prime minister like Moshe Sharett to replace him.

Non-defense of the democratic regime is therefore the motive of Saar and the new government to limit the term of office of the Prime Minister of Israel. The immediate motive is the experience of the difficulty of claiming the crown in the face of the power of the leader - of Saar and his colleagues Lapid, Lieberman and Bennett. They believe that their difficulty in ousting Netanyahu stemmed from the length of his tenure, but in fact it was a result of the simple fact that neither his party nor its voters wanted him replaced, despite the prosecution's accusations. This is the elephant in the room of Israeli democracy: the victorious and surprising fact that the Likud and its masses of voters do not believe the serious accusations of the State Attorney's Office. Their opponents accuse them of stupidity and enslavement of "baboons" (as repulsive expressions) to the leader. They do not take into account that perhaps stupidity is theirs - trust in unfounded indictments, and even enslavement is theirs - to the prosecution.

But it is not only the experience of those claiming the crown that motivates Saar.

It is the dangerous motive that gave rise to the indictments against Netanyahu: the desire of the legal system, which Saar allegedly heads but is in fact under its authority, to prevent the rise of a strong leader who might challenge its superiority.

And this is a government-executive supremacy, not just a supremacy in legal oversight, which it should have by virtue of the separation of powers.

It is also the motive for the second law proposed by Saar, which allows the attorney general to overturn or frustrate the public election through an unproven criminal charge.

Netanyahu's cases were born in his victory in 2015, when it became clear that he had become one of the most powerful prime ministers in our history, and when in his political camp the perception increased that the power of the legal system should be limited.

Saar is a servant of this system, at our expense - at the expense of our ability to choose effective leaders who will fulfill our political will.