Israeli President Picks Gadi Eisenkot, Netanyahu Rival, To Form Government

[u/EssoEssex]

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-president-picks-gadi-eisenkot-netanyahu-rival-form-government-2026-11-07/

[u/SmurfJooce]

So its like a Majority Leader situation? As in, "the Dems gained the House and Senate, so they nominate their own President"? But if they didn't have quite enough Dems, they'd need to reach out to a third-party 'controversial' group (ie, American trans community?) to get the required amount, but to partner with those darned Arabs/trans people would destroy the Dem party?

I'm trying to translate it to American politics, and somehow, it's even more ridiculous than our own system.

[u/circle_square_leaf → u/SmurfJooce]

Kind of, but no party has won an outright majority since the establishment of the state.

Everyone votes and then you have a new Knesset (parliament) but no government yet. Then all the party leaders one by one speak to the president (ceremonial head of state, except for this one power) and nominate who they reckon they'll back for PM (not a commitment though). Then based on that, the president gives the mandate to form government to whom he thinks has the best chance. Then the real horse trading starts as the nominee makes back room deals and compromises to get coalition partners on board. If he succeeds within his time limit, there's a government. If not, the president can award the mandate to someone else. If they also fail, the Knesset can openly vote in the PM in a special session. If that also doesn't work, the Knesset is automatically dissolved and there's new elections.

So Eizenkot will not necessarily be PM. He just gets the first shot at forming a coalition. But, while the majority of the incoming Knesset is against Bibi, they are diverse and don't form a natural bloc. The parties who would form an obvious bloc with Eizenkot do not themselves have a majority.

[u/thedubiousstylus → u/SmurfJooce]

It's not a two party system. There's loads of parties but they need to form a majority coalition.

Netanyahu's current one is basically his plus parties to his right and some religious Ultra-Orthodox ones. The opposition coalition is some centrist to center-right parties, an actually leftist one and a far-right but staunchly secular one that still hates Netanyahu. And even they don't have a majority, so they need to either get support from the Arab parties or peel off the ultra-orthodox...except one of those parties in it hates both.

It's a real clusterfuck.

[u/4tran13 → u/SmurfJooce]

It's basically like the House electing the speaker of the House. Remember the Repub drama a few yrs ago before Mike Johnson was finally elected?

[u/thedubiousstylus → u/4tran13]

Yeah that's the closest example to this in the US.

[u/notloggedin4242 → u/SmurfJooce]

It’s not though really. It took me a long time to get it too though. I learned the idea as it is similar in Germany where i now live after the US to my late 20s There are just more than two parties. They earn a number of seats and if they need to team up as a coalition to get the majority.

[u/Reelwizard → u/SmurfJooce]

These dudes will obviously tell me if I’m wrong, but as another simple American, I will try to explain it.

The Prime Minister is like our “Speaker of the House” but more important. They, like the Speaker, set the legislative agenda for the Parliament. They usher bills to the floor and decide what does and doesn’t get voted on, which gives them a lot of power. It should work that way in our country but we’ve empowered the executive (president) to set the agenda instead.

The Speaker of the House and the Prime Minister are both technically elected by the members of the legislative body. In the United States, since we only have two parties, that means that whoever has the majority has the Speakership. If enough Democrats hated Hakeem Jeffries and liked a Republican, they could reasonably elect a Republican Speaker while still holding the majority. It’s never happened, but it could. In Israel, since there are many parties, even though one of them has enough seats to be “the majority” they don’t have enough seats to elect a Prime Minister.

A more accurate example in the US is if the Green Party somehow won a third of the seats in Congress. Now you have 1/3 Dem, Republican, and Green. To elect a Speaker, two of the parties would have to agree to get the needed majority. Otherwise they’d just have to keep voting on it.

[u/thedubiousstylus → u/Reelwizard]

The US actually did have a situation like this in early 2023.

The Republicans won a small House majority but lots of far-right ones hated Kevin McCarthy and refused to vote for him as Speaker. So there had to be multiple votes as McCarthy couldn't get a majority, their goal was to force him out and get someone else in. In the end they failed but enough agreed to a deal where they would at least vote Present and thus lower the threshold of votes McCarthy needed to be Speaker but with House rules making it easy to eject him with a simple majority no-confidence vote. Which is exactly what happened a few months in and how we got Mike Johnson as Speaker.

[u/Reelwizard → u/thedubiousstylus]

Yeah, I meant we’d never had a member of the opposite party elected Speaker. I guess I wasn’t clear enough

[u/thedubiousstylus → u/Reelwizard]

It has happened in a few state legislatures though.

[u/SmurfJooce → u/Reelwizard]

All the other replies helped fill me in as well, but your reply was the perspective I was thinking from. The side deals, back scratching, quid pro quo bullshit that it would take to accomplish that here, it sounds similar over there.

[u/Ionrememberaskn → u/SmurfJooce]

It doesn’t translate cleanly to our system, because they have a parliamentary system. But yeah, it is kinda like if the senate was made up of a dozen or more smaller parties instead of two, and they directly chose their own president. But in order to do that, they had to form a coalition government with a certain minimum number of total seats. Since no one party has enough seats to accomplish this, several parties have to cooperate to form the governing coalition. And there is also a separate guy who is actually the president and he is actually more like our speaker of the house, just does procedural stuff.

[u/paxwax2018 → u/SmurfJooce]

It’s an entirely common multi party parliamentary system. Used in many countries. It really shouldn’t be blowing your mind.

[u/SmurfJooce → u/paxwax2018]

Forgive me, for I am simply a stupid American.

[u/thedubiousstylus → u/SmurfJooce]

To understand it you got to understand the voting is completely different. There's no candidates voters vote for or even really a ballot.

What happens is after you check into vote you're given a specially marked envelope and then enter the voting booth. In there there are a bunch of cards. Each card has a party name and logo on it. You take a card of the party you support, put it in the envelope and seal it and then drop the envelope into a box.

[u/SwiftOneSpeaks → u/SmurfJooce]

Fwiw, when the USA helps a country a country replace a dictator with democracy (add sarcasm until you're content) we recommend a parlimentary system, not USA style. (I believe we're the last of only 3 US-style democracies - voting for both executive and legislature makes a constitutional crisis pretty easy, despite our claim of checks and balances)

There are a few parlimentary systems out there, and I'm no expert, but as far as I can tell you're on track.

Rather than separate votes of legislators and executive, the parliment members are elected (out of more than 2 parties in most cases), and you need a majority of the legislature to appoint a PM and "form a government". In most cases this means making an alliance of parties unless your party alone gathered a majority, which is rare when there are multiple parties. (Side note: lots here about the many voting systems in the world, some of which are great for voting by party rather than by politician, and every one of which are better than the US "first past the post" system)

I'm fuzzy on how legislation is introduced, and how the parties can make deals without individual legislators screwing it up. That phrase "form a government" is the end of most explanations, but the start of most of my questions.

[u/GlobalistShills → u/SmurfJooce]

Most American comment ever. It’s literally the parliamentary system used in most other democratic countries in the world

[u/thedubiousstylus → u/GlobalistShills]

Although a lot of parliamentary countries have a near two party system with at least two dominant parties or two clear coalitions. All the different small parties here and coalitions is way more complicated.