Seismic upheavals

Editorial

Now, mere hours before an American election that seems to have been going on for two years or more, there appears to be about a 50-50 chance for a seismic shift in American politics. The United States, given its labyrinthine primary and general election system with its massive monetary expense, is a never-ending process.

Canadian politics, by contrast, seems lightning fast. Even though a series of minority governments recently gave Canada four elections in seven years, the actual campaigns came and went in a period of weeks. Within this period of succession, seismic shifts in political reality have occurred. The Conservative movement, divided and left for dead 20 years ago, is back in power ensconced with a comfortable majority. The Liberal party, once deemed Canada’s “Natural Governing Party,” is at its worst ebb ever. Even an American election that ditches an incumbent president or reverses control of one of the houses of Congress may not usher in so radical a change in the political dynamic in that country as we have seen in Canadian party politics. There are but two parties in the United States that have any potential for power and they are uniquely hide-bound and apparently impossible for a third party to dislodge.

Then there’s Israel. For its first three decades, Israel was governed by the Labor party. An era of alternating power, including coalitions, followed. Recent years have seen an astonishing realignment and instability in Israel’s party system.

The announcement last week that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud movement would merge, at least for the purposes of January’s elections, with the Yisrael Beiteinu party of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, is the latest revolutionary shift in Israeli politics. The last such massive shakeout was when then prime minister Ariel Sharon left Likud to create Kadima. Last week, a cluster of Kadima members of the Knesset bolted the party, at least some planning to join the new right-wing block. Political lines that were once drawn sharply have now blurred.

Meanwhile, the new Labor party leader, Shelly Yacimovich, is facing a potential revolt over revisions she is making to the way candidates for her party are selected.

Despite whatever internal conflicts are taking place, commentators see the changes happening in the political spectrum as at least incrementally advantageous to the Labor party, which has fallen to historic lows in public support. Early polls after the announcement of the Likud-Beiteinu merger say the Labor party is in a clear second-place position, making the new playing field rather more like the traditional binary electoral system of decades ago.

Metaphorical seismic shifts in Israeli politics are becoming just about as common as actual seismic shifts along British Columbia’s coast. Yet even seismic shifts in democratic politics seem trifling when compared with the ousting of entrenched powers and structures in autocratic regimes. In the region around Israel, longtime despots are being upended, annihilated or threatened. This week, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, said that instability caused by the Arab Spring could last for a generation. Between Sunni and Shia conflicts, political schisms within each state, and the plain reality that, aside from Egypt, all of the regional Arab states are what Ayalon calls “artificial” (meaning they were drawn up by European colonial designees), the future is deeply uncertain for many states in the region.

In the interconnected world we inhabit today, changes in one country’s body politic are felt to varying degrees in adjacent jurisdictions and worldwide. Certainly the outcome of Tuesday’s American elections will impact Canadians, Israelis and people around the world in both subtle and significant ways. Similarly, developments in Israel will impact the region. Even more directly, the path taken by the states in the Middle East and North Africa that have cast off decades-long oppressors will determine not only the freedoms of their own people but the peaceful (or otherwise) future of the region and the world.

As an old adage goes, the only thing constant is change.

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