A Tale of Three Elections
High stakes and close calls in Brazil, Israel and America
Before getting into the meat of this post, I wanted to thank my readers for their patience with my absence during shiva, and for the kind words some of you sent me on the death of my father. They are very much appreciated.
The final results of yesterday’s midterm elections in the United States are still unknown, but it’s already clear that they represented a far better night for the Democratic Party than most observers anticipated going in. A lot of pundits are already interpreting the results in various ways, whether to vindicate the Democratic focus on abortion and democracy, or as a demonstration of the importance of candidate quality and the albatross of Trump. I’m interested in those explanations and will no doubt join the debate about them. But while it’s not too soon to try to understand why Democrats did so much better than anticipated, it is a bit too soon to try to understand the significance of the election because its final result is still to be determined. I wrote a whole series of columns after President Biden’s 2020 victory premised on the notion that he’d be negotiating with a Republican Senate, which of course turned out to be completely irrelevant. I’d prefer not to go down that road a second time.
Instead, I want to stress a different point. Back in 2020, the Senate runoff elections in Georgia not only determined whether President Biden had to pursue a bipartisan agenda or could push legislation in a party-line manner; they may have determined whether the Biden administration was able to staff itself or the judiciary, whether it was able to make foreign policy effectively, even whether the administration was able to function at all in a lawful manner. Right now, it looks very plausible that control of the United States Senate will once again come down to a runoff in Georgia, and the stakes are similar. Meanwhile, if the GOP does take the House, as is likely, the very thinness of their prospective majority puts veto power in the hands of the most obstreperous members of the GOP caucus. As we saw most dramatically in 2016, but also in 2000 and in 2020, in a polarized environment very narrow victories can have a lasting impact on history. That’s a potential civic problem regardless of who ultimately wins these close contests, and it’s worth thinking about independently of the desire for one side or the other to win.
A frequent way of responding to that problem is to talk in terms of institutional design. Most American elections involve partisan primaries followed by first-past-the-post plurality-victory general elections. In the context of a cycle of reciprocal polarization, that can lead to very dangerous gambits like the Democrats boosting the fortunes of the most extreme and democracy-threatening Republican candidates so as to gain an upper hand in the general election—a move that, however risky, looks to have paid off.
One could argue, therefore, that a system of proportional representation might work better for America’s current politics which are more ideologically-sorted than our institutions were designed for. That would allow for kooks and extremists to be represented but not to hold major parties hostage.
Anyone who believes that, though, should take a look at the recent election in Israel.
I described that election as “close” on the subhead to this post which, on first glance, it doesn’t appear to be. First of all, the governing coalition will have 64 seats, clearly more than the bare minimum necessary for a majority. More important, the incoming Israeli government, while the most right-wing in its history, looks likely to be relatively stable because of its ideological coherence and lack of cross-cutting tensions. There is no secularist party like Yisrael Beiteinu in the coalition, and the dominant Likud party has largely been purged of dissenters from Netanyahu’s rule. The right won decisively and will form a coherent and stable government while the opposition is wildly fragmented and lost. How is that close?
But the election was close, for a simple reason: two key opposition parties just barely missed the cutoff for representation in the Knesset, and that is the reason that there is a right-wing majority in the first place. The left-wing Zionist party Meretz and the Arab nationalist party Balad between them earned over 6% of the total vote, but earned no seats. Had they gotten a few thousand more votes, they would each have gotten four seats and Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition would have failed to achieve a majority.
I’m not suggesting that this would have been a more democratically-representative result. On the contrary; the Israeli right and far-right probably got a bare majority of all votes cast, and if Balad and Meretz had made the cutoff and no party could have formed a coalition Yair Lapid would likely have remained a caretaker prime minister while the country prepared for more new elections. That’s clearly a less-representative outcome. I think this extreme right-wing government is a catastrophe, but it is a far more plausible representation of what Israelis actually voted for than any alternative. Rather, I’m just pointing out that however stable and majoritarian it is, it came into existence by a whisker based on the vagaries of proportional representation and the minimum threshold. Those vagaries are no less arbitrary than the quirks of America’s system.
Meanwhile, it’s also worth noting that Likud’s large new coalition partner, the Religious Zionist Party—which Netanyahu personally midwifed—is precisely the collection of extremists and kooks that are not supposed to run the show in a proportionally representative system where multiple partners are theoretically available. Yet here we are, and they clearly have the whip hand. That, in turn, is not materially different from the problem Republicans have with their own extremist fringe running the show, which has been going on for far longer than Trump has been on the scene, lest we forget the Obama-era antics of the House Freedom Caucus.
I take all of the foregoing as a lesson in the limits of system design to mitigate the leverage inherent in a highly-polarized and closely-contested political climate.
Which brings me to Brazil.
Brazil has the kind of presidential system that political scientists dislike, and a federal structure similar to America’s. It also just had a very close election in a highly polarized context, a result that seemed likely to lead to institutional breakdown given that the incumbent, Yair Bolsonaro, had already declared before the election that he would not accept a loss as legitimate. But he did lose—and much more narrowly than most observers imagined he would months ago, which would seem to increase the likelihood of post-election shenanigans—yet the transition appears to be proceeding mostly peacefully, with Bolsonaro himself accepting defeat and calling on his protesting supporters to accept it as well. Why has that been the case?
Francisco Toro writes convincingly in Persuasion that three factors were crucial. First, the fact that many of Bolsonaro’s strongest allies did win reelection, which inhibited them from casting doubt on the election results. Second, the fact that both Brazil’s military and judiciary along with much of the international community (and not only the American-aligned portion thereof) quickly moved to accept the results and congratulate Lula for his victory preemptively isolated Bolsonaro should he have tried to contest the results. And finally the fact that Lula had served time in jail reinforced for Bolsonaro that if he did try to stay in power by illegal means, he might well face the same fate if he failed.
All of that is, as I said, fairly convincing. But two important points jump out. First, none of those explanations relate to institutional design. Rather, they reflect the overarching interest that the various stakeholders, foreign and domestic, have in the stability of the system as such. And second, they therefore also implicitly reflect a consensus that loss is acceptable and survivable however unpleasant. Lula has been routinely promising a more centrist approach to governance than his history might suggest, but this widespread acceptance of his victory suggests that many of these other stakeholders either believe him or believe that his freedom of action is constrained by fiscal reality and an oppositional legislature. Regardless of why, they are accepting reality, and articulating their acceptance.
That spirit of acceptance has also been reflected in Israel in the wake of their election. The transfer of power is proceeding peaceably and normally, with both the outgoing prime minister and international actors recognizing the new government as legitimate, however odious. That probably sounds like a very low bar to clear, but in context it shouldn’t seem that way. After all, Israel’s new government credibly threatens the liberal and democratic character of the state and will presumably immunize its leader from prosecution for corruption. Brazil’s new government also brings back to power a man who was sent to prison for corruption, and who many on the right fear could bring his country down the road that Venezuela trod long before. Those are stakes that a demagogue might easily use to justify refusal to accept defeat. Which is precisely what has been happening in America in the Trump era, most prominently but not solely within Trump’s party.
The best sign out of our own closely-fought election, then, is not that democracy won at the ballot box (though that is good), but that democracy is winning since the ballots were cast, that numerous prominent election-denying candidates have conceded defeat and that the president is promising to work with the opposition that he not long ago denounced—for understandable reasons—as a threat to democracy itself. That’s the only road back, regardless of institutional design. It’s harder to do in an era of high polarization and close contests, where the stakes really do seem existential and the margin between victory and defeat is narrow. It’s all the more essential for that very reason.
Basically, a lot of anti-democratic behaviours in USA, Israel and Brasil . Sad development