Israel deserves center-right leadership

    Yesterday, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni's centrist Kadima party pulled slightly ahead of Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party in the country's general election after trailing for months in the polls.
    While Livni and her supporters hailed their apparent two-seat victory, two things should give them pause. First, the ongoing counting of soldiers' ballots has the potential to add another seat or two to Likud. Second, even if Kadima manages to hold a one- or two-seat lead in the Knesset, the ability to hold power in Israel is dictated by a party's ability to build a coalition with other parties.
    Kadima already tried and failed to build a majority coalition for six weeks in September, and their position has not improved. The smart money says that Netanyahu will be Israel's next prime minister, and the only question is about the makeup of his governing coalition. With 30 parties on the ballot during this election, the relatively strong showing of right-wing parties gives Likud the ability to build a coalition that excludes Kadima and other left-leaning groups entirely.
    We at the Daily, however, would like to offer a somewhat radical approach: we believe that Likud should form a coalition with Kadima.
    At first glance, this partnership makes little political sense. A split government between these two evenly-matched parties would be more of a power-sharing agreement than a governing coalition, and there would be a push for power and advantage by officials from each group that could make running the country difficult.
    Indeed, the easiest coalition for Netanyahu to form would be solidly right-wing to far-right; in order to cut out the headaches of a broad-spectrum inter-party squabblefest between liberal and conservative elements, Likud could potentially partner with Avigdor Lieberman's secular nationalist party as well as the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party and other religious nationalists. This would spare Netanyahu a prolonged power struggle and solidify his position as the undisputed leader of the nation.
    That is not, however, the coalition for whom the Israeli public voted.
    What should be noted, and what we at the Daily would like to address, is that the voting was largely center-right rather than right-wing. The largest voting blocs went for centrist Kadima (29 seats), center-right Likud (27-28), Lieberman's right-wing secular party (14) and Labor's left-wing party (13). Though the electorate is split, it is clustered largely in the center-right of the political spectrum, separated only by a small matter of degrees.
    Netanyahu has the ability, at this point, to build a solidly right-wing government by adding Lieberman's party and a handful of other right-wing or hawkish groups to his coalition. He also, however, has the ability to build a center-right coalition more in keeping with the vote of the Israeli people by adding Livni's Kadima to his government. This move will not be easy — in the fractious world of Israeli politics, few things are — but it has the potential to give the Israeli people a government populated by the people for whom they cast their ballots.