Open Primaries Among the “National-Religious” Public

Open Primaries Among the “National-Religious” Public?

Dr. Asher Cohen of Bar Ilan University's Political Science Department has suggested open primaries for Israel’s “national-religious” community. Israel’s National-Religious public is deeply committed to the principle of a sovereign Jewish state. The community’s educational institutions, formal and informal, are acknowledged to produce large numbers of idealistic young people highly motivated to good citizenship and public service. This public’s institutional and communal coherence completely break down in the political sphere, where it is in considerable disarray.

Thirty years ago this community was represented by one party, the National Religious Party (NRP), which at its height received 10% of the public vote. The NRP more or less copied the institutions of the veteran Mapai (Labor) party: It had its affiliated bank, health fund, youth movement, etc. and a Central Committee that took all political decisions. Today, at least four factions compete for the vote of this community, divided by fine points of ideology too arcane for most outsiders (and many insiders) to follow. The factions are “united” in one party, the National Union, which ran in the last elections and received nine seats. Since then the factions making up the National Union have been at each others’ throats, threatening to divide and run separately, to the disgust of many of their constituents. Recent polls show the National Union declining to five seats in the next Knesset. Part of the reason for the decline of the National Union is stagnation in its slate of Knesset candidates: The same faces keep coming back, election after election. This is widely regarded as retarding the emergence of fresh agendas and initiatives.

Right now, none of the factions holds primaries. One is committed to doing so before the next elections. Dr Asher Cohen of Bar Ilan University’s Political Science department has proposed an iconoclastic idea for the “national-religious” community: Open primaries.

The idea of open primaries, familiar in other political systems, is new in Israel: You don’t have to belong to a party to select its candidates. All you have to do is care enough about the party and its prospects to identify with it and walk into its (primaries) polling booth. In this manner Dr Cohen hopes to get around the problem of factional distinctions within the “national-religious” public. You don’t have to belong to a particular faction, or to any of the factions, to vote. In fact, according to Dr Cohen’s plan, you don’t even have to be religious. You only have to believe in strengthening the public power of the “national-religious” public. It is believed that a small but significant portion of Israel’s general public feel this way.

The object of the open primary is threefold:

a) To get around the narrow ideological differences that separate the various factions and attract the participation of people who don’t like any faction.

b) To create a new political leadership that better represents the views of the “national-religious” public and is likely to draw increased support at the polls.

c) To create new leaders who will appeal to the broader public, and to a degree, compete with the “regular,” secular parties for mainstream votes. Dr Cohen’s plan includes four stages:

1. A professional survey of political positions and attitudes within the National-Religious public, to ascertain the range and relative weight of different points of view within this public.

2. Formation of a “public committee” consisting of prominent rabbis, academics, jurists and educators reflecting the various points of view in the “national-religious” public—none of whom are candidates for election.

3. Selection of a panel of 50 potential Parliamentary candidates, half to be proposed by the “public committee” and half (on a proportional basis) by the existing factions.

4. Open primaries to rank the candidates. Anyone who, on primaries day, expresses identification with the “principles of national religious Zionism,” not to be further defined, can receive a ballot and vote.

According to this system, it is clearly possible for the entire current Parliamentary representation of the “national-religious” public to be pushed out of the 10-12 leading positions on the slate that can be considered realistic. It is also unlikely that this will happen. In all likelihood the system will produce a combination of old and new. One question that arises is whether the candidates chosen in such a system will get along and cooperate with each other in the Knesset any better than the existing candidates and factions. The advantage of nominating people who share the same party affiliation is that know each other and are, prima facie, committed to cooperation.