Israeli Cabinet endorses U.S.-type presidential rule

JERUSALEM — Does Israel need a strongman?

Since the summertime war in Lebanon, Israel's leadership has been in turmoil. The government, widely blamed for mismanaging the conflict, is fracturing. Corruption and sex scandals are shaking people's faith in politicians. Israelis tell pollsters the system is broken.

Sunday, the postwar angst pushed an idea with growing appeal onto the Cabinet's agenda: Israel should scrap its parliamentary system, which tends to produce shaky coalition governments and quickly throw them out, in favor of American-style presidential rule.

The Cabinet voted 12-11 to endorse the reform proposal and send it to the Knesset, Israel's parliament.

But passage is far from certain, in part because the sponsor is a right-wing politician with growing popularity and leadership ambition. If Avigdor Lieberman were to benefit from his own reform, his critics say, he might turn Israel's democratic free-for-all into an autocracy.

An immediate consequence of the Cabinet's decision was to bring Lieberman and his Russian-immigrant-based party, Israel Our Home, a step closer to joining the government. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, elected in March, has been trying since the war ended Aug. 14 to shore up his beleaguered coalition.

One of Lieberman's conditions for joining was Cabinet backing for his bill, regardless of its fate in parliament.

Olmert lobbied hard for approval, despite his misgivings. His centrist Kadima Party faces a possible revolt by its leftist coalition partner, the Labor Party; he needs a new ally to preserve his majority in parliament and avoid elections that polls show he would lose.

Instability has been a hallmark of politics in Israel, which theoretically elects its leaders for four years but has changed governments 31 times in its 58-year history.

Voters elect a parliament, and the parliament's 125 members elect the prime minister and Cabinet from among their ranks. Governing coalitions with a parliamentary majority are formed after negotiations among many parties but fall apart with chronic ease, allowing parliament to force new elections

Israel's leaders, said Tel Aviv University's Gideon Doron, "have to spend 80 percent of their time investing in their survival." Those who survive the longest, he said, are those who risk the least.

As a result, Doron and other political scientists say the system discourages decisive government action on a wide range of needs — modernizing the school system or the public-transport network, for example. In the postwar fallout, Israelis have blamed their leaders for failing to upgrade the armed forces and confront the armed might of the Hezbollah militia in southern Lebanon.

"A prime minister doesn't need an agenda," Olmert told Israeli reporters last month. "He just needs to run the country."

Under Lieberman's bill, the prime minister would be elected directly by voters and name a Cabinet from outside the ranks of parliament, with no need for parliamentary approval. Parliament also would be stripped of its power to call early elections. It could dismiss a prime minister only by a vote of 80 or more members; in that case the deputy prime minister would take over.

That would give Israel's leader powers similar to those of the U.S. president, except that he still would be called prime minister. Israel's current presidency, a ceremonial post, would be abolished.

Lieberman's proposal has been around for years but gained currency after his party finished a strong fourth in the March election, taking 12 seats in parliament. A new book by Doron, the Tel Aviv political scientist, advocating a "presidential regime" boosted the reform movement. Polls in recent months show that most Israelis want stronger leadership.

Some critics call the proposal a recipe for gridlock between a prime minister and an opposition-controlled parliament. Others reject it as a formula for dictatorship by an unfettered ruler in a country without a constitution or complex system of American-style checks and balances.

"In a country with a weak democratic culture like Israel, the president could govern by coercion and violence, without consent," said Tom Segev, a leading historian. "A presidential system is one of solitary decisions, not one of compromises, and is therefore harmful to minorities and exacerbates disputes and schisms. Everything will be personal."

Such misgivings are reinforced by Lieberman's nationalist views.

A 48-year-old Russian-speaking immigrant from Moldova, he proposes redrawing Israel's border in a way that would strip 150,000 Arabs of their Israeli citizenship and transferring the towns they live in to the Palestinian Authority. In return, he would annex the largest Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

"It is not scary," Lieberman said to reporters last week. "On the contrary, it is the lack of political stability that is scary. ... Political instability in Israel is harming the very ability to make decisions and run things in a reasonable manner."

To get the Cabinet's grudging approval, Olmert promised that his own party's milder reform proposal — giving the prime minister less autonomy than Lieberman wants — would be submitted to parliament at the same time. Leaders of several parties said a compromise was likely to emerge.