The world may be interested in the whereabouts of Vladimir Putin and whether Elton John’s boycott of Dolce and Gabbana turns out successful. Here, in the holy land, we wait for the elections to the parliament that will take place this Tuesday. The elections, which should have been an easy stroll for acting prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu, turned out to be a difficult trek.
There are 120 parliament members and two main candidates for the position of prime minister: Benyamin Netanyahu, who heads the right-wing parties, and Isaac Herzog, who heads the center-left parties. The way a government is formed is that after votes are counted and the 120 seats are divided among the parties, largely in proportion to the number of votes they got, the leader of each party recommends to the President of the state a person, which that party backs for the post of prime minister. The President then asks the person who he believes has the highest chance of creating a coalition to try and make a coalition. If that person fails, then the President asks another person to form a coalition, and so on.
Latest polls say that the parties that support Netanyahu will get about 55 seats, and the parties that support Herzog will get roughly the same number of seats. The remaining 10 seats will go to a newly formed party, headed by Moshe Kahlon, who said that he would recommend nobody to the President. Why did he say it? On the one hand, Kahlon was a parliament member of Netanyahu’s party (and a minister in Netanyahu’s government), and his voters come from the right wing. Saying that he will recommend Herzog is a death strike to his party. On the other hand, he was very critical about Netanyahu’s conduct and poses himself as “the true representative of the right wing”, and so he cannot say that he will recommend that person whom he thinks is not a good prime minister.
Who will then be the prime minister? PredictIT.com estimates at 56% the probability that Netanyahu is reelected. And if not? Then Herzog, as there is no one else.
Almost. Think of the situation from the eyes of game theory. Suppose that neither Netanyahu nor Herzog are recommended by more than half the votes. Herzog is in a bad shape: the Arab party is supposed to recommend Herzog, and polls predict that it will get about 13 seats. Traditionally the Arab parties are not invited to be part of the government: Herzog will have to make a coalition of more than 60 members excluding the Arab party; this is tough. Netanyahu is in a bad shape as well; polls predict that his party will lose quite a few seats, and if he will not be recommended by more than half the members of the parliament, he might be kicked out by his own party. So who can be the new prime minister?
I ask you to consider the swing voter, Kahlon. Since he comes from the right wing, all parties in the right wing will prefer him to Herzog. All the parties in the left wing will prefer him to Netanyahu or to any other candidate from the right wing. This is a hell of a reason not to recommend any of the two to the President.
Is my theory right? Will the swing voter use his power to become the real winner of the elections? We will have to wait a few weeks and see for ourselves.
The Leisure of the Theory Class 
4 comments
March 15, 2015 at 7:56 pm
jd
I had thought of this a while back when Kahlon was much higher in the polls. However, it seems hard to leverage 9 seats to be PM. Another issue is that his slate is devoid of any heavyweights. If he thought he had a realistic chance at the top he would have been able to recruit a less sectorial and more powerful party.
One additional thing is that he has a surplus agreement with Lieberman. Lapid+Lieberman+Kahlon could make a run for it.
March 16, 2015 at 3:46 am
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March 16, 2015 at 1:48 pm
Anonymous
Nice post.
Something very similar did happen in India in 1996. The two main rivals, Congress and BJP fell well short of the 272 mark required to form the government in a parliament of 543 seats. Congress preferred to have anyone but the BJP in power. BJP was the single largest party but could not form the government. Congress had some 140 seats as opposed to the BJP and its allies’ 187. Congress supported a “third front” (which was essentially a collection of opportunist and ambitious politicians without much ideology) whereby the prime minister was HD Deve Gowda, the leader of a party called Janta Dal which had won 46 seats only, less than even 10% of the total.
This translates to less than 12 seats in your situation. So not at all unprecedented I would guess. The silver lining, if anything, is that in India the hodgepodge government fell within 2 years and fresh elections delivered clear mandate. So even if your swing voter was to create issues it may not persist going by anecdotal evidence.
March 17, 2015 at 5:38 am
Eran
I hope you’re right if only for the boost our blog will get when the newspapers say a game theory professor has predicted the outcome. But I don’t think this is very likely. My guess is that Herzog and Netanyahu will prefer to hang with each other over giving the prime ministership to Kahlon.