Nrp Leaders Divided over Agreement with Dove Party

National Religious Party leaders are divided over a pre-election deal that would seemingly grant legitimacy to the breakaway dovish religious party Meimad, led by Rabbi Yehuda Amital.

The discord surrounds an “extra-votes agreement” that prevents votes for a particular party from being “wasted” under Israel’s arcane election procedure.

According to the procedure, a party can win a seat in the 120-member Knesset by polling 1/120 of the total vote. With 3,000,000 Israelis expected to vote Nov. 1, 25,000 votes are needed for a single Knesset seat.

But if a party polls only a fraction of the 25,000 needed for a seat, those votes could be wasted, unless it enters into a deal with another party to combine “fractions” in order to reach the total needed for a seat. One of the two parties, usually the one with the larger fraction of votes, will then receive an extra seat.

Parties usually conclude these agreements with those closest to them ideologically: Likud has made a deal with Tehiya on the right, and Labor has made a deal with the Citizens Rights Movement on the left.

Some NRP leaders had virtually concluded a deal with Meimad, when NRP Political Secretary Shaul Yahalom demanded that the party instead cut a deal with the ultra-Orthodox Sephardic party Shas instead.

Yahalom has warned his colleagues that besides granting the fledling party legitimacy, the NRP would be implicitly predicting that Meimad will succeed in earning enough votes for at least one Knesset seat.

Any party polling less than the number needed for a seat is disqualified from any vote-sharing agreements.

But even if Yahalom can persuade his NRP colleagues to rescind their deal with Meimad, his troubles won’t be over: Shas may prefer making a deal with the other, largely Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox party, Agudat Yisrael.