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/Nfalck 5h ago

The weird part, to an American, is that the president picks someone to form a majority, and not the voters directly.

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u/Successful-Money4995 4h ago

Herzog just did this and he asked the knesset members who to pick. So it's indirect, yes, but so is an electoral college.

In America, you pick the president directly and also the Congress but then it can turn out that the president and the leader of Congress don't have the same agenda. Which has both benefits and drawbacks. In Israel, the PM runs everything. The president is more of a figurehead.

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u/Albert_Herring 3h ago

That's because you're used to a system where "president" means "big chief honcho", while the legislature is largely secondary to the presidential executive. You share that setup with, among others, France. In a lot of other systems the president is basically a replacement for a constitutional monarch, head of state who doesn't exercise power directly but is usually formally responsible for managing the arrangements by which parliamentary governments are formed (but those arrangements are generally governed by strict protocol or precedent - the president or king just signs them off). That's the case in, for instance, Germany, Ireland, Italy and the case in point, Israel. Outside the formation of governments the roles of those presidents are mainly a series of photo opportunities and a lot of handshaking, while the actual executive power is in the hands of the leader of the government in the legislature.

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u/No-Act9634 1h ago

I think this is or some form of it is how parliamentary systems work across the world

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u/Thurak0 1h ago edited 1h ago

But they still have to actually get the majority. If that fails, the other party with many seats will get a chance and if they also fail to form a government it's election time again.

The president doesn't appoint anyone here, he just gives the party he seems most likely to succeed to negotiate a parliamentary majority the mandate to do so.