Israel s Centrist Victory

Centrist Democratic International

Always a politician in search of a platform to sustain his lust for power, Netanyahu is now forced to change course and form a centrist government. The remarkable success of Yair Lapid s new centrist party, Yesh Atid ( there is a future ), makes it practically impossible for Netanyahu to form a right wing coalition with his traditional allies from the lunatic fringe.

But when you get specific, when you actually ask about the actual taxing and spending issues under consideration, people are remarkably centrist, they're remarkably open to compromise.

SANTIAGO The Viennese writer Stefan Zweig allegedly said, Brazil is the country of the future and always will be. Likewise, centrist politics in Latin America has perpetually been on the horizon until now.

The really big battle this November will be joined by the Social Democrats (PDSR) and by the centrist alliance Democratic Alliance. Tudor has no chance of becoming the first Christian President of Romania.

In neighboring Brazil, President Dilma Rousseff s administration made little effort to hide its preference for Macri s opponent. As her government plumbs record lows in opinion polls, the centrist opposition has been inching toward power.

Moreover, nationalism has spread from the streets into the elite. Nationalist statements that would have been confined to the extremist newspaper Den in the early 1990 s are now considered normal, centrist, even commonplace.

For one thing, the coalition exposes an undercurrent in British political life that has coexisted almost furtively with heated rhetoric convergence among the main parties towards a kind of centrist synthesis on most of the big issues.

So, given that differences in policies as they are implemented have become largely a matter of degree, why do centrist parties remain weak? Why have they failed to unite moderates on both sides of the ideological divide?

But, either way, the bipolar political system to which Italians were getting accustomed is unlikely to survive unscathed. The left right divide will become easier for opportunistic politicians to cross, and perhaps a new centrist party will emerge.

And yet, although the electoral arithmetic makes a stable centrist government one that could maintain Britain s current policies on taxes, economic management, and Europe almost impossible to imagine, continuity is the outcome that most international business leaders and politicians seem to expect.

Meanwhile, the political damage is ongoing not all protest parties are as pro European as Greece s ruling Syriza. And domestic politics is being distorted by the inability of centrist politicians to address voters concerns about the eurozone s economic policies and its democratic deficit.

That is bad news for citizens, not just for politicians. By leading the charge to reinvigorate democracy, centrist reformers can draw on the best of the liberal traditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to ensure Latin America s success in the new millennium.

The formation of a new Israeli government, one more centrist in its composition and support, is another positive development. Israel is now led by a prime minister who has the ability to make historic choices and a government inclined to support him.

Voters were unable to choose between the incumbent and the opposition, because the same centrist parties were in office all the time. Government crises were merely an opportunity to reshuffle key cabinet positions or change the party faction of the prime minister.

He heads a broad coalition that includes his own liberal minded Republican Proposal Party, the center left Radical Civic Union, and other centrist groupings. The coalition will not command a majority in either house of Congress, so legislating will require fashioning temporary ad hoc alliances.

Israel s response to Hamas s victory will obviously be complicated by its own elections on March 28, and by a government headed by an interim prime minister, Ehud Olmert, owing to Sharon s incapacitation just weeks after leaving Likud and founding a new, centrist party, Kadima (Forward).

France and Germany compete openly as alternative centers of influence vis à vis the smaller European states. Centrist parties pay the price for their support of the European integration project, and are repudiated in the polls by parties of the extreme right or extreme left.

And if the centrist alliance finishes first in the election, it will still need coalition partners to form a majority in the Knesset. Gaining fewer than 30 of its 120 seats might drive it to seek potential partners among the orthodox an approach that could alienate moderate secular voters.

But the importance of the distribution of seats pales in comparison to that of the longer term changes in Israeli politics implied by Kadima s victory. Indeed, having attracted leading figures from both Labor and Likud, Kadima is now established as the most successful centrist party in Israel s history.

Despite having to form a new party, Sharon will probably win the next election, which he has called for February. Peretz s strategy may draw voters from other parties on the left, but Labor will most likely lose centrist voters (and those for whom national security is paramount) to Sharon.

From independence in 1948 until 1977, the Labor party was dominant, before giving way to an opposition coalition of conservative, nationalist, and centrist parties allied in the Likud bloc. Since then, the two parties have taken turns in power, sometimes in grand coalitions and often in partnership with smaller parties.

These populists promise solutions that dispense with the habits and norms of moderation, notably with centrist democratic policies and an internationalism that seeks to promote peace and prosperity. One sometimes wonders whether we are experiencing not so much the end of history as the end of enlightened history, perhaps of the enlightenment itself.

These voters chose him a year ago not only because he was not Sarkozy, but because he incarnated the values of the true left, even if his centrist moderation seemed a bad omen. Voters of the center or even the center right are disappointed, too, by their president s lack of charisma, if not sheer incompetence.

Moreover, at a substantive level there is not really that much difference between the two alliances (and even less between the centrist Piñera and Frei). Yes, traditional constituencies of the right, such as the business sector, the military, and the Church, will find a somewhat more welcoming government, but a sharp rightward turn is unlikely.

In the Polish capital, Catholic and conservative parties, together with the Solidarity Trade Union, inspired by a reactionary Christian radio network, Radio Maria, gathered for political and cultural, rather than economic, reasons. In the name of the defense of media freedom, they were denouncing a government that they found too centrist and insufficiently Polish.

As the months pass, both parties will probably find that they face their greatest political difficulty in managing the fringes of their own camps rightists in the Conservative Party, who don t like the centrist moderation of the coalition s policies, and leftists in the Liberal Democratic Party who don t want to support a largely Conservative government.

The British Liberal Democrats, for example, have tried for decades to become a strong centrist third party, without success. While the political vocabulary in the United States is different, the Democratic Party, since Franklin Roosevelt s presidency, is indeed a center left force, the Republican Party occupies the right, and no other significant party exists.

Citizens of smaller eurozone member states will have noted the brutal way the ECB was politicized to achieve Germany s goals in Greece, and the conclusion that the eurozone is a dangerous union for small countries will seem inescapable. If centrist parties remain on the sidelines, rather than protesting what has happened, the political extremists will gain further valuable territory.

Netanyahu, with his weak and vacillating leadership exposed, sacked his opponents, Lapid and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni (who also denounced Netanyahu s settlement construction plans), and called for new elections. But the real game changer was the declaration by Herzog and Livni, who leads the small centrist Hatnuah party, that their parties would run jointly in the elections.

The first is Monti s surprise resignation in December, after losing the backing of Berlusconi s party. While he will not run as a candidate (he is already a senator for life), he formed a centrist coalition affiliated with neither the left nor the right to contest the election, and has declared his willingness to resume his leadership role if the coalition is victorious.

But favorable economic indicators have made little difference to the standing of Cameron s Conservatives in opinion polls, and have done nothing to save their coalition partner, the centrist Liberal Democrats, from a severe slump. Too many voters, it seems, still do not feel better off, and for good reason average incomes have barely begun to rise, following seven painful years.

The centrist Liberal Democrats appeared to hold the balance of power, and stories circulated of how Heath was prepared to concede a reformed voting system. He held out the promise of proportional representation, which would ensure a greater number of parliamentary seats for the Liberal Democrats in future elections, in exchange for the party s support for a new Conservative government.

President Jacques Chirac of France, but also Brazil s leftist president, Lula da Silva support a tax on airline tickets designed to finance poor countries development. Similarly, the centrist leader François Bayrou, has proposed imposing a Tobin tax (named after its creator, the Nobel laureate economist James Tobin) on financial transactions, with the proceeds to be used to support socially worthy causes.

In fact, the persistence of strong reservations about both Royal and Sarkozy helps explain the surge in popularity for a third candidate, Francois Bayrou, a traditional centrist, pro European politician. Bayrou has never had it so good, but, barring the unlikely collapse of one of the two leading candidates campaigns, he will fail to qualify for the second round runoff.

With alternatives to the status quo constrained, it has become clear that Israel is in a long transitional period in which old ideas don t work and a new approach is needed. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni s Kadima party, opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu s Likud party, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak s Labor party all fall  with only secondary variations within a centrist consensus, which also reflects a popular national consensus.

And the army has already become the purview of nationalistic and religious cadres, even without conscription of the ultra orthodox one of the centrist camp s demands in pressing for fairer national burden sharing. As a result, the Israeli state seems to be moving closer to its Asian counterparts, with their emphasis on economic innovation and their indifference to universal values or, for that matter, peace.

With alternatives to the status quo constrained, it has become clear that Israel is in a long transitional period in which old ideas don t work and a new approach is needed. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni s Kadima party, opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu s Likud party, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak s Labor party all fall with only secondary variations within a centrist consensus, which also reflects a popular national consensus.

There is no overarching explanation for Obama s successive Middle East failures, but there are a few factors worth considering the increase in the number of asymmetrical conflicts, in which the traditional use of force is largely ineffective increasingly blurred lines between difficult allies and intransigent adversaries and major political differences between a centrist US president and a Congress that is dominated more than ever by extreme ideas.

Some of the moderate orthodox parties, which have been undergoing their own internal splits, have also signaled their willingness to work with a center left bloc that might enable Israel to make real progress. Even Minister of Foreign Affairs Avigdor Lieberman, head of the right wing Yisrael Beiteinu party, is now criticizing Netanyahu for alienating the US and has suggested that he would not rule out joining a centrist government.

There is no overarching explanation for Obama s successive Middle East failures, but there are a few factors worth considering the increase in the number of asymmetrical conflicts, in which the traditional use of force is largely ineffective increasingly blurred lines between difficult allies and intransigent adversaries and major political differences between a centrist US president and a Congress that is dominated more than ever by extreme ideas. nbsp

Such parties can help to integrate the extremes into the political mainstream, while facilitating alternation in power, which is essential to any democracy s dynamism a system in which a large centrist party remained permanently in power would be far less desirable. Those, like Monti, who want to mount a challenge from the center, however personally impressive they may be, have steep obstacles to overcome, and for good reasons.

But it is a tribute to the American two party system s capacity for political integration that extremist forces remain marginalized, despite the rhetoric of the Tea Party. President Barack Obama, in particular, has been able to attract support as a liberal left idealist and as a centrist realist at the same time, which enabled him to win re election in the face of a weak economy and an even weaker labor market.

Piñera benefited from his own critical stance towards the military government, and from an electoral campaign that emphasized the liberal much more than the conservative aspects of his coalition. Instead of vindicating Pinochet and appealing to traditional Catholic values, Piñera offered a centrist vision of change that included more rights for homosexuals and an emphasis on social issues (in a country that, even after 25 years of strong growth, remains very unequal).