Here we go again. With roughly eighty-five percent of the ballots dutifully counted, Benjamin Netanyahu and his allied bloc find themselves hovering around fifty-three seats in the 120-seat Knesset. In ordinary human affairs, failing to secure a majority simply means you do not have permission to run other people’s lives. In parliamentary statecraft, however, coming up short is merely the opening bell for a grueling, multi-week auction wherein the currency is taxpayer money, regulatory carve-outs, and newly minted ministerial portfolios designed specifically to massage fragile political egos. The state, much like an embarrassing relative who refuses to leave the dinner table, insists on staging a massive public spectacle only to accomplish absolutely nothing of practical value.
Watching this democratic ritual play out in Jerusalem feels like viewing a rerun of a television show that should have been canceled three seasons ago. Pundits breathlessly parse percentage points and turnout figures as if the fundamental question of human flourishing hinges on whether a political operator can scrape together sixty-one seats instead of sixty. Yet behind the partisan hand-wringing lies the same dreary structural defect that Friedrich Hayek diagnosed decades ago in Law, Legislation and Liberty. When representative assemblies abandon their role as guardians of general, equal rules of just conduct and transform into engines for distributing specialized favors, the entire enterprise degenerates into an unprincipled bidding war. Government becomes not a neutral referee, but a vast clearinghouse of privileges.
Consider the inevitable next phase of this process. Because no single party holds a coherent mandate, the coming weeks will feature endless backroom summits where fringe factions demand their pound of flesh. We all know how this works, regardless of the country or the parliamentary dialect. To cobble together a governing majority, leaders will not promise deregulation, lower levies, or an end to state meddling. They will promise the opposite. They will offer targeted subsidies for select constituencies, special exemptions from civil mandates, and guaranteed budgetary spoils to any minor party willing to prop up the coalition. In the end, the citizenry does not get a leaner, more modest apparatus; they get an expanded cabinet, three extra deputy ministers with private security details, and a labyrinth of conflicting regulatory promises that take a legion of bureaucrats to administer.
The grand irony of these endless electoral cycles is how little the permanent administrative machine actually cares about the outcome. While campaign managers lose their minds over exit polls and coalition permutations, the regulatory apparatus quietly grinds along on autopilot. Central bankers continue their macroeconomic alchemy, tax collectors process their levies, and regulatory boards churn out compliance directives regardless of which particular grandee occupies the prime ministerial residence. We are conditioned to treat elections as monumental hinges of history, but the truth is far more mundane. The modern state is a self-perpetuating behemoth, and changing the driver of a runaway steamroller rarely changes the trajectory of the machine itself.
It is always fascinating to observe the collective amnesia of the electorate during these moments. Citizens expend immense emotional energy cheering for their chosen faction, convincing themselves that if only their preferred coalition reaches the magical threshold of sixty-one, peace and economic rationality will finally descend upon the land. They rarely pause to ask the more fundamental, uncomfortable question: why should sixty-one individuals in a room of one hundred and twenty possess the legitimate authority to dictate the property rights, trade relationships, and personal associations of millions of peaceful individuals in the first place? Democracy, when detached from strict limits on state coercion, simply becomes a mechanism for legitimizing the arbitrary will of whoever happened to construct the cleverest patronage network.
As the remaining votes are tabulated and the post-election theatrics shift to private conference rooms, the usual chorus will lament the instability of it all. They will claim that what the nation truly needs is stability, a strong hand, or a clear majority to push through ambitious state programs. They have it backward. An incapacitated legislature that spends its time arguing over coalition arithmetic is, in many respects, doing far less damage to the spontaneous order of civil society than an active one armed with a sweeping mandate to regulate, tax, and engineer human behavior. The gridlock is not a tragedy; it is a brief, accidental respite from the ambition of planners who believe they can organize society from the top down.
Eventually, of course, the wheeling and dealing will conclude. Hands will be shaken, ceremonial photographs will be taken, and some combination of politicians will declare that they have formed a government dedicated to the public good. The rest of us will be left with the bill, as well as the nagging reminder that no matter who wins the coalition lottery, the administrative state remains entirely undefeated.