Israel Office_________________________ The 2008 Municipal Elections in Israel – Outcome and Political Implications Abraham Diskin* On November 11 Israel held its municipal elections in 164 settlements. 660 candidates competed on the post of mayor. A second round of the elections – in 31 settlements where the race was not decided in the first round – took place on November 25. General elections to the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, are scheduled to February 10, 2009. The municipal elections, in which half of the eligible voters participated, are regarded by many as an indicator of the possible outcome of the Knesset elections. In the following pages we shall demonstrate however that the correlation between municipal and general elections in Israel is quite weak. The Israeli Voting System – Between Municipal and General Elections Thirty years ago, in 1978, Israel used for the first time a double-ballot electoral system in its municipal elections. On one ballot the voters were asked to support their preferred candidate for the position of mayor. On the other ballot they were asked to support their preferred list-of-candidates for the municipal council. The system worked quite well on the municipal level, especially because of proper interference of the Minister of the Interior in most cases where clashes between the mayor and the council occurred. An attempt to follow the municipal electoral-governmental system and to adopt a double­ballot system on the national level failed. In 1996 and in 1999 Israel had double elections for its parliament – the Knesset, and its prime minister, but both Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu, who was elected as prime minister in 1996 and Labour’s Ehud Barak, who was elected in 1999, failed to maintain a majority coalition in the Knesset and lost their position. In 2001 Israel held‘special’ elections of its prime minister(without having parallel elections of the Knesset). Likud’s Ariel Sharon was elected and on the day that he presented his new government to the Knesset he also insisted that the Knesset would change Basic Law: The Government , such that Israel will return to a single ballot vote and to a regular parliamentary system. The relative success of the double-ballot system on the municipal level contradicted its evident failure on the national level. This is only one example of the different lessons that one can be draw from a comparison between 1