Opinion | Crisis of Democratic Regimes: Loss of Fundamental Political Freedoms Israel today

Right-wing leaders thought the system gave them a political advantage;

Now she hit right.

If we do not recover, it will hit us all and further undermine the democratic regime.

Not only do we have a crisis in the democratic regime. Serious problems have been discovered all over the world - Britain has withdrawn from the EU, for example, also because of the unrepresentative nature of its executive institutions. This elitist nature threatens democracies throughout Europe. In France, Germany and Italy, and to varying degrees in the other continents as well, the power of the ruling parties and the main opposition parties is very small.

The arena split into shards of medium and small parties. The rabbinical electoral system ("the winner wins all") in English-speaking democracies is currently preventing such disintegration, but there is also an erosion in other aspects of representative democracy.

The corona undermines the legitimacy of democratic leaderships. Even before it, there was a great deal of tension between the domineering tendencies of elitist establishments and the rebellious "populist" tendencies of the ruled. On this tension was poured the oil of suspicion, not to mention paranoid, cultivated by the plague. All over the democratic world, conspiracy plots spread from reality have spread. Large groups of so-called "crazy" voters, who support opposing leaders, such as Trump or the new Jewish presidential candidate Eric Zamor, to defend themselves against alienated elites.

Another important example: There is always tension around the purity of the US election, but for many decades I have not remembered a situation where such a large part of the American public doubts the kosherness of the election, and is not convinced by the faint legal procedures that examined it. Also due to the one-sided or blatant nature of most of the media. The democratic press goes bankrupt with severe postmodernist degeneration processes.

Our crisis is part of a general undermining of democratic regimes.

Whoever has his eyes in his head must discern the danger to fundamental political freedoms, chief among them the danger to the right of the citizens to determine who will run their affairs, i.e. to stand on their own two feet through the sovereignty of their people.

We have a source of danger in three related centers: a constant weakening in the governance of public representatives in favor of jurists, mainly, and also officers, economists, senior officials and other experts;

Continuous disintegration of the party arena created by our extreme relative election system, to the current slump of a prime minister who is the head of a 6-MK party; centralization, camping and loss of the professional ethos of the media, and its degeneration to propaganda.

True, all of this is evident in the other democracies as well, but for us the disintegration and judgment of the party arena are more extreme phenomena.

There is no democratic regime that suffers from a strange and distorted governing coalition like the one now ruling here.

It is also difficult to imagine a general prosecution in a democratic regime that allows itself to blame a political leader who represents a large portion of the electorate based on such a dubious legal precedent, “fishing investigations” and blatant violations of detainees ’rights.

In the special circumstances of Israel today, the main victim is what we call the "right."

But the right is also the main source of these two obstacles.

Judgment was an important principle in the political ideology of Begin and his movement.

It is no coincidence that those who motivated him were Aharon Barak's allies in the Likud - Meridor and Lynn;

That most of the process took place under Likud-right governments;

And that Netanyahu did nothing to stop him, until he was harmed by it.

Begin and his movements, Herut and the Likud, are also responsible for the fortification of our crumbling relative electoral system, the one we now foresee in its instability and lack of representation.

Right-wing leaders from Begin to Netanyahu thought the system gave them a political advantage, so they stuck to it.

Without them, Mapai would have been able to change it. Now it has hit the right. And if we do not recover, it will hit us all and further undermine the democratic regime.

Were we wrong?

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