Back in the Great Depression era of the 1920s in the United States, the Republican Party campaigned on assuring voters of a “chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.”
The longstanding cynical political ploy of promising constituents just about anything to get elected should be recalled with caution as Israel enters its final 30 days before its fateful October 27 election.
In a functioning government, regardless of elections, legislation is passed, allocations are approved, and programs are launched and implemented all the time, as they should be.
A country needs to run, decisions must be made, and budgets must be disbursed. During election season, however, every move is suspect. What are the motives? Who is the initiator, and who benefits?
Current government holds all cards
Call it election economics, and in this case, the government holds all the cards. That’s why it’s ever so important that every bill and every allocation must be circumspect and vetted extra carefully by the opposition, the media, and the general public to ensure that decisions are not being made simply to garner favor and secure voting loyalty.
Some ministry decisions should be beyond reproach. For instance, last week, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced a NIS 35 million pilot program that will compensate uninsured businesses for direct property damage caused by protection-money extortion.
As The Jerusalem Post reported, the program will provide an economic safety net that will help businesses maintain operational continuity and encourage them to cooperate with law-enforcement authorities, thereby assisting the effort to reduce the phenomenon.
This program benefits everyone, and it would be difficult to construe its implementation as an election ploy to buy votes.
On the other hand, this past summer, Smotrich also announced a roughly NIS 2.4 billion funding package for neighborhoods and access roads in West Bank settlements. Coming as it did, with the full knowledge that an election was in the offing, the move can be seen as a blatant attempt by Smotrich to bolster his electoral base.
Sometimes, efforts to discern the difference between electioneering and legitimate decisions become blurry.
A-G postpones E1 proposal deadline over electioneering concerns
On Sunday, the Attorney-General’s Office ordered a monthlong delay of the deadline for submitting proposals for a tender to build 1,200 housing units in the controversial E1 expansion near Ma’aleh Adumim, citing concerns that the project could be used for electioneering.
The delay would move the deadline until after the election. Ma’aleh Adumim Mayor Guy Yifrach, however, argued that the attorney-general’s decision itself constituted a form of reverse electioneering.
“The diplomatic decision to advance the tender was made months before the election, and since then, it has progressed via a professional process that by its nature takes time,” he told Hebrew media outlets. “If the claim is that continuing the tender is ‘political,’ I say exactly the opposite: Stopping it now is, in fact, an intervention with political implications.”
There is a thin line separating allocations and legislation that are a normative outcome of a functioning society that is responsible for millions of people’s safety and services, and thinly veiled bribery to lock in support, party loyalty, and votes.
As we enter the final month before the October 27 election, it’s incumbent on all elected officials from the government, its ministries, and the Knesset to display the utmost responsibility and rein in the instincts to cozy up to constituents with financial incentives and benefits disguised as legislation.
Past elections have shown that those instincts are usually impossible to tamp down. This time, the stakes are too high to allow election economics to take hold. Vigilance is needed and demanded, and violations should be called out with vigor.
At the same time, not every government decision can be confronted with the accusation of vote buying. A country needs to keep running. We call on the government to refrain from election economics and the opposition to refrain from calling every government decision made in the next month to be all about the election.
There are more than enough vital issues facing the country, and the parties running should be articulating how they intend to address them if they gain Knesset seats or join the government.
That’s the way to garner support and loyalty from voters – not by buying their ballot with sectarian favoritism.