Death of an Opposition

Earlier this month, Tzipi Livni strode away from yet another Knesset press conference making alarmist statements of government incompetence and scathing attacks on Benjamin Netanyahu’s premiership. “The prime minister doesn't know how to make decisions… and Israel is weak. Two years later, the time has come to change this horrible government. Kadima always was and will be a voice for the good citizens who live in this country." But this is just the latest outburst in Livni’s 2-year-long campaign of demonization being waged with the aim of winning the next election. 

From the beginning of her role as Israel’s opposition leader, Tzipi Livni took an approach that omitted healthy political dialogue between the majority and the opposition parties. Just weeks after the 2009 elections, she was running a campaign of character assassination, describing Netanyahu as "easily blackmailed," on account of his cabinet appointments.  Coming from a young politician who had rocketed in rank –under two prime ministers renowned for their cronyism—from an unknown backbencher to justice minister and then foreign minister in just three years, this struck as cynical at best.

Israeli politics is known for its raucous nature and constant upheaval, and in this Tzipi Livni is not original. But one thing the Kadima chief’s personal approach has made abundantly clear is that there’s no real opposition party in Israeli democracy today. Livni’s disregard for substantive debate, her stiff-arming of any civil discourse, and her rather crude substitution of inflammatory rhetoric in place of policy discussion has created a vacuum of deliberation in Israeli lawmaking. With Mubarak’s fall, a metasticizing Iranian threat and an unsympathetic Whitehouse, now more then ever, an opposition should be in the eye of the governing storm assisting where it can, instead Livni struts in front of reporters with thunderous statements, generating international headlines that only seems to add to Israel’s burdens.

The primary role of an opposition party in a democracy is to provide a check on the majority in power. This institutional check is based on the political wrangling that takes place in full view of the public between the majority at the helm and the opposition ready at the heel to assume the wheel. The opposition through the political processes challenges the ruling party through discovery, deliberation and better solutions. If the voter becomes convinced that the opposition will serve its better interests than the current majority, come election time, those in power are replaced and the political pendulum shifts once again.

When the opposition’s main focus is no longer better governance but better electioneering, civic dialogue on the political level is lost, and power politics sets in which corrodes the democratic process. Tzipi Livni’s early decision to continue her election campaign after the votes had been counted revealed not only her unbridled ambition, but an unwillingness to do the glamourless political labor of keeping the majority in check.

In all this, Tzipi Livni learned from a master. When Ariel Sharon broke up his own governing party in 2005 with one masterful, Machiavellian maneuver, it was Livni who was both his prime beneficiary and protégé. Sharon went into his premiership projecting an image of the political sabba (grandfather), the man above the fray. But his politics were the politics of the strongman -- putting himself above the party and eventually using political pragmatism to trump democratic responsibility. Livni, an acolyte of the Sharon school, exhibits this very same disregard for process -- and the same fixation on results. The only difference is that while Sharon ruled over the majority Livni must, for the moment, make do with the opposition.