Yoav Peled
Before the war, there was what I would call a constitutional counterrevolution, because the constitutional revolution occurred in the 1990s, and this was a great process of liberalization. Since this current government was it, they immediately launched a counterrevolution to deliberalize the judicial system and the government system as a whole. This caused huge demonstrations, and to some extent it was halted or slowed down, but now it’s done under the guise of the war.
It is done in less dramatic ways but in very important ways, bureaucratically mostly. These moves are what is now commonly called the hybrid regime. The hybrid regime characterizes populism and power. The populist movement has tended to establish or transform the regime to a hybrid regime, which is democratic in form and authoritarian in content.
This is the process that’s been going on and is still going on. The popular base in Israel are the Mizrahi, in other words, people whose families came from the Muslim world. It’s interesting because usually populism is attributed to the economically left behind in the West. The Mizrahi in Israel, historically of course, were left behind, but in the last twenty or twenty-five years, they have been moving ahead. The economic gap between them and the Ashkenazi, whose families came from Europe, is closing.
Still, Mizrahi support for populism is about 60 to 70 percent. Support for populism means support for the populist leader, and the populist leader is Netanyahu. This is the basis of his continuing success. Other populist parties, are most importantly, Shas, the ultra-orthodox Mizrahi political party, and also Ben-Gvir’s party.
Ben-Gvir is a new phenomenon, and since he has never run on his own, it’s hard to tell [how popular he is]. All we have now is polls. By the way, the polls show significantly that in the last elections…
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Auteur: Yoav Peled
