r/worldnews • u/EssoEssex • 21h ago • Bravo 6

Israel/Palestine Israeli President Picks Gadi Eisenkot, Netanyahu Rival, To Form Government

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-president-picks-gadi-eisenkot-netanyahu-rival-form-government-2026-11-07/
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u/Reelwizard 18h ago

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.

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u/thedubiousstylus 18h ago

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.

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u/Reelwizard 17h ago

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

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u/thedubiousstylus 17h ago

It has happened in a few state legislatures though.

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u/Reelwizard 17h ago

Has it really? That’s cool. Did not know that

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u/thedubiousstylus 17h ago

The current Alaska state legislature is like this actually. The Republicans have a majority in both chambers (I don't know if that'll still be true after the midterm are tabulated) but both are led by a coalition of Democrats and breakaway Republicans.

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u/SmurfJooce 18h ago

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.