Shinui as political bellweather

Most of the anti-Orthodox vote should have benefited the left of center parties, especially Meretz. They made the Orthodox a target of convenience long before Tommy Lapid made it a Shinui cause celebre. That this anti-Orthodox vote mostly benefited Shinui is the result of an anti-Oslo sentiment that shifted many center and center-left voters to the right, but no so right as to want to vote Likud. Shinui served as halfway political house for these shifting votes.

The vote for Shinui also expressed despair over growing corruption of the political system. As in other democracies, government intervention in Israel’s economy has created a nexus between money and power, only more so in Israel, where a socialist past resulted in immense government influence over economic affairs. The great amount of goodies the government is able to “distribute” has radicalized the political strife between those who hope to benefit from government favor. But it has also made politics such an attractive proposition that it pays trying to gain political power by “investing” in its purchase. Hence the growing incidents of election corruption.

Still the Shinui vote was not only a negative protest vote. There was another element to the Shinui success that only few observers remarked on, but that the politically astute Tommy Lapid grasped, and grafted as a vital theme of his campaign that may have overshadowed the “hate the Orthodox” theme. It is the anger Israelis increasingly feel toward their totally ineffectual and wasteful government and their resentment of the inordinately heavy and inequitable burden of taxation it imposes on the middle class, even as a prolonged recession keeps crushing it.

Should this trend grow, should Israel’s most productive middle class finally rid itself of the defunct Statist ethos that still holds sway in Israel even among the right, and acquire a positive ideology to lend conviction to their cause, Israeli politics will be transformed. Still better, many of Israel’s intractable social and economic problems, resulting from its Statist ideology and economy, might at long last find solutions.

Shinui was first established in 1974 by a group of academicians in the wake of the protest movements that rocked Israel after the Yom Kippur War debacle. It failed in its first electoral bid. But after it merged with a group of disenchanted Laborites led by former General Yigael Yadin, considered then the Mr. Clean of Israeli politics, it won in the 1977 elections 15 seats. They mostly came from Labor voters expressing a general malaise and protesting revelations of endemic corruption in Labor. 1977 became a watershed election because if was the first time since the establishment of the state that the right got to establish a government. But this did not happen because the right gained so many more votes, but because Shinui siphoned off so many Labor votes. When it joined Begin’s coalition in the vain hope that he would institute electoral reform, it enabled him to form a broad based center-right coalition.

The wish to see the Israeli electoral system reformed was the only common denominator that held Shinui together then. Its efforts eventually bore fruit when a law for the direct election of a prime minister was passed. But it did not achieve its objective while it participated in Begin’s coalition, and this resulted in internal quibbling—bound to develop in a one issue party whose leaders held diverse ideological positions. These gradually eroded Shinui’s credibility as a party with new, decent politics, and its fortunes declined. In 1992, most of its leaders joined with radical left parties, Mapam and Ratz, to form Meretz. Only a small faction, led by MK Avraham Poraz—a stalwart defender of economic liberalization—kept Shinui’s original identity.

The party languished until 1999, when Poraz recruited the very popular Tommy Lapid to head Shinui. The sharp tongued and politically savvy Lapid exploited the wave of resentment many Israelis developed (with considerable help from a leftist media) toward the Orthodox. Yet Shinui’s success was due in large part to the image of a moderate right wing party Lapid skillfully crafted and to his perceptive recognition that a large middle class was growing in Israel and that no one was representing it.

Middle class Israelis have become increasingly frustrated with Labor’s Statist ideology and its advocacy of a huge wasteful, anti-productive welfare system. It was the heavy tax levied from the middle class—over 60% at the margin—that financed much of government waste and corruption, since low-income earners did not pay taxes, nor did the many privileged groups that enjoy all kinds of exemptions, nor the rich who earn income from capital.

It is this shift in Israel towards the right (the left command now no more than 20% of the Jewish vote!), bolstered by a developing middle class consciousness that is the real significant story of the recent Israeli elections, and not the anger against the Orthodox that existed for decades.

It may be that Shinui, like its predecessor of the seventies, will fall apart because it has not developed a coherent ideology. Its representatives talk in many voices, not least about economic issues, from a Poraz who declares himself a pro-market advocate to Ettie Livni who recommends that Israel adopt Third Way policies (apparently the news has not reached some Israelis that even in Europe the Third Way is not taken seriously any longer). The party does not seem to have a plan to deal with Israel’s severe economic problems: lack of growth, little competition and low productivity, the plethora of monopolies, an overwhelming bureaucracy and the excessive concentration of assets in the hands of the few (over 44% of all assets are in the hands of four entities!). It mostly complains about the heavy tax burden and the problems of foreign workers, which exacerbates unemployment in Israel.

Should Shinui develop, however, a coherent platform, and an ideology that will give direction and purpose to a nascent middle class revolt, should it take the task of reforming the disastrous Israeli economic system seriously, it could become a very significant political force. Despite its claims, Likud—with the one notable exception of Benjamin Netanyahu—has never championed the cause of serious economic reform so the political arena has a significant niche available for a party ready to raise the flag of reform.

Only time will tell whether the charismatic Lapid will manage to make out of the disparate Shinui elements a coherent political force, and whether he will recognize the exceptional opportunity economic reform offers. Should he seize the hour, his success will make Shinui more than a passing episode, indeed it may make it responsible for one of the more positive turns in Israel’s history.