Daniel's been watching the latest political scramble in Israel and sent us a question that gets at something deeper than the usual election horse race. Opher Winter, a controversial IDF general, is rapidly spinning up a new party to challenge Netanyahu. And Daniel's observation is that this keeps happening here — parties pop up overnight, each one promising to be the solution, and voters are exhausted. He's asking two things. First, can these agile new parties actually build the internal infrastructure to be credible long-term alternatives to the incumbent government? And second, how can voters tell whether a newcomer is a serious operation or just a rash reaction to the status quo?
The structural conditions here are almost uniquely permissive. Israel has a three point two five percent electoral threshold and pure proportional representation. That's one of the lowest barriers to entry among established democracies. You don't need to win a district, you don't need a regional base, you don't need local chapters. You need roughly a hundred and forty thousand votes and you're in the Knesset. For context, that's about the population of a mid-sized city. Ramat Gan, for example. Imagine if the entire population of Ramat Gan could put a party in parliament.
And that's the whole game. You don't need to convince a geographic majority anywhere. You just need to find your hundred and forty thousand people scattered across the country who are angry about the same thing you're angry about.
And in a country of nine million, that's not a high bar. You're fishing in a very large pond for a relatively small catch. Compare that to a first-past-the-post system like the UK or the US, where you have to win a specific district. You need local volunteers knocking on doors in a defined area. You need to know who the ward councillors are, who runs the community centers, what the local issues are. In Israel, none of that is necessary.
So the startup analogy basically writes itself. Low barrier to entry, rapid launch, compete on a national stage immediately.
Right, and Daniel raised that comparison directly. It works on some levels — speed to market, ability to pivot, no legacy infrastructure weighing you down. But where it breaks is what happens after you ship. A startup can launch a minimum viable product, see if it works, iterate in private, fail quietly if it doesn't. A political party that crosses the threshold is immediately governing. Those seats are binding commitments. You can't push a bug fix to your coalition agreement.
You also can't sunset the country and return investor capital.
No. The users are stuck with the build. And unlike a software product, there's no offboarding process. You can't migrate your citizens to a competitor's platform because your party's housing policy turned out to be a paragraph someone wrote on a Thursday night.
So let's talk about Opher Winter specifically. What's his background?
Brigadier General, commanded the Givati Brigade, later the IDF's Gaza Division. He's been publicly controversial within the military — clashed with the command over operational decisions, particularly around rules of engagement. There was a widely reported incident where he told soldiers during a 2014 operation that the enemy must be struck with, quote, "no mercy." The IDF reprimanded him for that. He's positioned himself as a hardline security figure who believes the military leadership has been too restrained.
Which is a lane that exists in Israeli politics and has for decades. But the question isn't whether there's an audience for that message. It's whether a general who's been in uniform his whole career can build an organization that does more than repeat his talking points.
This is where the infrastructure question bites. Let me walk through what a credible party actually needs. Policy research capacity — people who can write detailed position papers on housing, on the cost of living, on education, on healthcare, on foreign relations. Legal and compliance teams who understand campaign finance law and can keep the party from accidentally breaking a dozen regulations. A candidate vetting process — and this one matters more than people think. You need to know who you're putting on the list, what's in their background, whether there's a scandal waiting to surface. A fundraising apparatus that doesn't depend entirely on the leader's personal network. Field operations — people who can organize events, manage volunteers, get out the vote. And coalition negotiation experience, which is its own dark art entirely.
Can we pause on coalition negotiation for a second? Because I think people hear that phrase and picture a conference table with water bottles. But it's much stranger than that, isn't it?
It's completely bizarre. Coalition negotiation in Israel is not primarily about policy. It's about portfolio allocation, budget commitments, and what I can only describe as legalized horse-trading. Who gets the finance committee chair? Which ministries get protected budget lines? What appointments does each party get to make? And the people who are good at this have usually been doing it for years. They know the parliamentary procedure, they know the personalities, they know which promises are enforceable and which are theater. A new party walking into coalition talks is like someone who's played three hands of poker sitting down at a professional table. They don't even know what they don't know.
Most new parties have none of this at launch.
Most new parties have a leader, a name, a list of people who said yes to a phone call, and a social media strategy. That's the minimum viable party. And the problem with the MVP in politics is that voters treat it as a finished product.
Because it is one. You don't get to tell the electorate this is a beta.
So let me give you the counterexample — the case where someone did it right. Yesh Atid, 2012. Yair Lapid spent months before the launch building an organizational structure. He recruited experienced campaign staff, developed a detailed policy platform, set up local branches, built a membership base. When they launched, they weren't a name and a press conference. They were an operational political organization. They won nineteen seats in their first election.
And they're still here. That's the key. Three elections later, multiple coalitions, they're still a going concern.
Still here, still organized. And the contrast case?
Give me the one that looked good on launch day and evaporated.
Take Kulanu, Moshe Kahlon's party. Launched in 2014, won ten seats in 2015, joined the coalition, got Kahlon the finance ministry. Kahlon was popular — he'd broken up the mobile phone cartel as communications minister, people saw him as someone who got things done. But the party was built around him personally. When his political capital declined, the party had no independent institutional life. No local branches with their own leadership. No policy development pipeline. No bench of candidates who could carry the brand forward. By 2019 it had merged into Likud and essentially ceased to exist. One term, gone.
Or the defense-sector parties that have popped up over the years. A general retires, announces a party, wins some seats on security credentials, and then dissolves within a cycle or two because there's nothing holding it together except the guy at the top.
And that pattern is so consistent it's almost a law of Israeli political physics. The parties that survive more than one term are the ones that built organizational capacity before their first election. Paid staff, policy papers, local branches. The ones that launch on charisma alone almost never make it past the first cycle. I can count on one hand the exceptions, and even those usually merged into something larger.
So what does Winter actually have right now?
From what's publicly visible — a name, a security message, and a network of people who share his critique of the military and political establishment. What I haven't seen is evidence of a policy infrastructure. No detailed platform on housing or the economy. No list of candidates with relevant expertise beyond security. No indication of local organizing capacity. Now, that doesn't mean it isn't happening behind the scenes. But the public-facing side is very thin.
And the timeline matters here. If elections are coming in the next few months, he's trying to build an airplane while it's already taxiing down the runway.
That's exactly the phrase. And the thing about military leadership — and this is one of the misconceptions Daniel's question gets at — is that commanding a brigade and building a legislative coalition are almost entirely different skill sets. A general gives orders and they're executed. There's a chain of command. People salute. A party leader negotiates, trades, persuades, compromises. The hierarchy is flat, the authority is contingent, and nobody salutes. In fact, half the people in the room are actively trying to undermine you because they want your job.
The general-to-politician pipeline exists everywhere, but Israel has a particularly strong version of it. Rabin, Barak, Sharon, Mofaz, Ya'alon, Gantz. Some made the transition successfully, some didn't. The ones who did typically spent time in civilian political roles before leading a party. Rabin was an ambassador and a minister before he became prime minister the second time. Sharon held multiple cabinet portfolios. They learned the civilian game before they tried to run it.
Gantz is actually an interesting recent case. Former chief of staff, launched a party, positioned himself as a centrist security alternative. But even with that profile, his first election was shaky. The party survived because it merged with other factions and built coalition infrastructure over multiple cycles. It wasn't a solo launch. And even then, it took him years to look comfortable in the political role. You could watch the transition happening in real time.
Winter's positioning is different though. He's not running as a centrist. He's running to the right of the current government on security. That's a crowded lane.
Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, the existing right wing of Likud. You're not finding an empty market niche there. You're trying to outflank people who've been occupying that territory for years, with established voter bases and donor networks. And that brings us to the knock-on effect of all this party churn. When parties dissolve or merge every cycle, long-term policy work gets abandoned mid-stream. The Knesset's research department can't keep up when the political map redraws every two years. You get policy discontinuity on the issues that require sustained attention — housing reform, cost of living, infrastructure planning, security doctrine.
The cost of living crisis in Israel has been building for a decade and a half. Every party campaigns on it, nobody fixes it, and part of the reason is that the parties responsible for housing policy in one Knesset don't exist in the next one. So you get a new housing minister every eighteen months who has to learn the file from scratch, and by the time they understand the problem, there's another election.
The institutional memory walks out the door. Literally. The staff disperse, the policy papers go into boxes, the relationships with civil servants and stakeholders dissolve. Then the next new party comes in and starts from zero. The civil servants at the Ministry of Housing have seen six ministers in eight years. They've explained the same structural problems to each one. And each one arrives with a campaign promise that doesn't match the fiscal reality or the regulatory constraints. So nothing moves.
So let's get to the second part of Daniel's question. How does a voter assess whether a new party is a serious alternative or a flash in the pan?
I've been thinking about this as a diagnostic framework. Four signals. First, does the party have a published, detailed policy platform beyond slogans? Not a Facebook post, not a campaign video — an actual document that says what they'd do about housing, about education, about the budget, and how they'd pay for it.
And "we'll fix the economy" is not a policy platform.
It's a bumper sticker. Second signal — who are the candidates beyond the leader? Do they have relevant expertise? If the party is running on a platform of economic reform, are there economists on the list? If they're talking about education, is there someone who's run a school system? Or is it just the general's former adjutants and people who were available?
The list tells you whether the leader is building a government or a fan club. And you can usually tell within about thirty seconds of scanning the names.
Third — has the party built any organizational infrastructure before the election? Local branches, membership drives, fundraising operations that aren't just the leader's personal contacts. Can you join this party? Is there a way to get involved that isn't just sharing their posts? If the answer is no, you're looking at a broadcast operation, not a political organization.
And fourth, what's the leader's track record of follow-through in previous roles? Not what they say they'll do — what have they actually done, in positions where they had responsibility, that demonstrates the ability to execute on promises?
That fourth one is particularly important with military figures. A general's record is operational, not legislative. You can evaluate whether they built effective teams, whether they adapted to changing circumstances, whether they took responsibility for failures. Those are relevant. But you can't assume that battlefield decisiveness translates to coalition management. They're different domains entirely.
The other thing about that fourth signal — it's the one that takes the longest to assess, which means it's the one most voters skip. You have to go look at what actually happened, not what the campaign says happened. You have to find the after-action reports, the investigative journalism, the testimony from people who were in the room.
And that's where the exhaustion trap kicks in. When voters can't distinguish serious from unserious, some of them disengage entirely. They stop trying to evaluate. And paradoxically, that makes it easier for unserious parties to win seats — because a small, motivated base can get you across the threshold when overall turnout drops.
So you get a downward spiral. The system produces parties that can't govern, voters get exhausted and tune out, the threshold for entry stays low, more parties launch, the system gets less functional, voters get more exhausted. Each cycle feeds the next.
And Israel is not the only country with a low threshold. The Netherlands has a threshold of about zero point six seven percent, effectively one seat. Denmark is at two percent. Both see new parties, but both have stronger norms around coalition governance and policy professionalism. The Dutch system produces fragmentation but also produces detailed coalition agreements that run for dozens of pages and bind the parties to specific policy commitments. They spend months negotiating those documents, and they're treated as binding contracts.
Israel's coalition agreements are... not that.
They're often distributional documents — who gets which ministry, which budget lines are protected — rather than substantive policy roadmaps. The combination of low threshold, high ideological fragmentation, and personalist politics is what makes the Israeli case unusual. It's not any one of those factors alone. It's the interaction of all three.
Personalist politics — meaning the party is the leader and the leader is the party.
Right. Likud without Netanyahu is a different entity. Yesh Atid without Lapid doesn't exist. Yisrael Beiteinu is Lieberman. When the leader's political fortunes decline, the party has no independent institutional life to fall back on. There's no board that can replace the CEO. There's no succession plan. The party is an extension of one person's will, and when that person fades, the party fades.
So if we go back to Daniel's startup analogy, the thing about startups is that most of them fail. The market is supposed to kill the ones that don't work. In politics, the failure mode isn't a quiet shutdown — it's a term in the Knesset.
And sometimes a ministry. Kahlon got the finance ministry. That's not a failed startup that returned investor capital. That's a party with ten seats running the country's economic policy for four years. The stakes are not venture funding. The stakes are the national budget.
Which is why the infrastructure question matters so much. It's not an academic concern about organizational theory. It's about whether the people making decisions about your mortgage interest rates and your kids' school curriculum have the capacity to understand what they're deciding.
I want to add one more layer to this, because Daniel's question implicitly asks about the long term. Can these parties become credible alternatives to the incumbent government? And I think the answer is yes, but only if they do the unglamorous organizational work before they start asking for votes.
The unglamorous work being exactly what you described — policy papers, candidate vetting, local branches, fundraising infrastructure.
And that work is slow. It's boring. It doesn't generate headlines. Nobody holds a press conference to announce they've finished drafting a position paper on building code reform. But that's the difference between a party that can govern and a party that can only campaign.
The campaign is the part everyone sees. The governance is the part everyone lives with.
Most new parties only know how to do the first one. They're built by people who are good at getting attention, not by people who are good at running institutions. The skill set that gets you across the three point two five percent threshold is almost orthogonal to the skill set that lets you run a ministry.
Which brings us back to Winter. If he's serious about being more than a protest vote, the next ninety days are what matter. Not his military record, not his media appearances, not his critique of the current government. What matters is whether he builds an organization.
Voters can watch for that. Is there a platform? Who's on the list? Can you join? What's the track record? Those four signals will tell you more than any campaign ad.
I think we need a ground-level perspective on what it actually looks like inside one of these parties.
I think you're right.
Hilbert: Two thousand three. Shinui. I was hired three weeks before the election to write position papers on education policy.
Three weeks.
Hilbert: They put me in a borrowed office with a laptop and a phone. The party leader, Tommy Lapid, was on television every night saying we had detailed plans for education reform. I had three academic papers I'd skimmed, one phone call with a retired principal in Haifa, and about forty-eight hours to produce the party's entire education platform.
Forty-eight hours.
Hilbert: I wrote what I could. Educated guesses, mostly. Things that sounded reasonable. I had no data from the Education Ministry, no subject matter experts to consult, no time to do actual research. The platform was basically what a reasonably informed person could improvise in two days. I remember thinking, this sounds plausible. Which is not the standard you want for national education policy.
Shinui won fifteen seats.
Hilbert: Fifteen seats. Third-largest party in the Knesset. Tommy Lapid became justice minister. And the education platform I wrote on a laptop in a borrowed office — that was now the party's official position in coalition negotiations. They were citing my educated guesses in meetings with the prime minister's office.
Did anyone ever ask you to back it up? To provide the research, the cost estimates, the implementation plan?
Hilbert: No. The campaign was over. The policy papers went into a drawer. Nobody read them again. The party collapsed by two thousand six anyway. Internal fights, personality clashes, the usual. The whole thing dissolved.
The platform was a prop.
Hilbert: It was a prop. And I'm not saying every new party operates this way. But I'd bet that more of them do than voters realize. The campaign and the governance are two completely different games. Most new parties only know how to play the first one. They don't even know the rules of the second. They think governance is just campaigning from inside the ministry.
That's the infrastructure gap in one story. Not a lack of intelligence or good intentions — a lack of time, expertise, and organizational capacity.
Hilbert: The thing is, I was a decent researcher. I cared about getting it right. I still think about that platform sometimes. But I had no business writing a party's education platform in two days. And nobody involved thought that was strange. That was just how it worked. The assumption was that the details didn't matter because the campaign was about broad themes, and by the time details mattered, someone else would figure them out.
Because the incentive structure doesn't reward depth. It rewards speed.
Hilbert: Speed and a good story. The platform just had to exist so the leader could point to it on camera. What was in it didn't matter. It could have been lorem ipsum for all anyone checked.
Did you stay in politics after that?
Hilbert: I went back to research. Policy work for a think tank, then consulting. Shinui was nine months of my life. I still have the laptop, actually. It's in a box somewhere.
What was on it?
Hilbert: Mostly drafts. Three versions of the education paper. A memo on transportation policy I never finished. Some notes from the phone call with the principal. She was the only person who returned my calls. I called seven people. Six of them didn't pick up or said they were too busy. One retired principal in Haifa spent forty minutes on the phone with me and basically dictated the section on classroom sizes. That was the entire empirical basis for the education platform.
That's the thing that strikes me. You were trying to do real work. You weren't cynical about it. But the system wasn't set up for it.
Hilbert: The system was set up to get fifteen seats. Which it did. And then it had no idea what to do with them. The gap between the campaign apparatus and the governing apparatus was total. We had people who could write press releases and book television appearances, and then suddenly we had a ministry and nobody knew how to run it.
The question becomes — what would it take for a new party to be different? To actually build the capacity before the campaign, not after?
Time, money, and a leader who values organizational depth over media attention. Those three things. And they're all in short supply during a rapid launch. Time is the one you can't buy. You can hire staff, you can rent offices, but you can't compress the months it takes to develop real policy expertise and build functional teams.
Hilbert: Winter's got the media attention. The question is whether he's spending his time right now hiring policy staff or booking television appearances. You can't do both well in a compressed timeline. Every hour on camera is an hour not spent building the organization.
If Hilbert's story is any guide, the answer to that question predicts the entire trajectory.
It really does. The parties that hire the policy staff first — the ones that treat the platform as the foundation, not the prop — those are the ones that survive. The ones that treat it as a campaign accessory end up in a drawer. Or on an old laptop in a box.
Where does that leave us with Daniel's question? Can agile parties build the infrastructure to be credible long-term alternatives?
They can. The evidence says it's possible. Yesh Atid did it. But it takes discipline that most new parties don't have, because the system doesn't require it. You can win seats without it. The threshold doesn't check for organizational capacity. It only checks for votes. And the votes come from the campaign, not from the policy papers.
The voters are the ones left holding the risk. They cast a ballot for a party that looks credible, and six months later they discover the education platform was written in forty-eight hours by a guy with a laptop and a borrowed office and one phone call with a retired principal.
Which is why the diagnostic framework matters. Platform, candidates, infrastructure, track record. If voters start demanding evidence on those four dimensions before they vote, the incentives shift. Parties that want to be taken seriously have to do the work. They can't just point to a document that exists and hope nobody reads it.
The open question with Winter is whether he's doing it. The next few months will tell us. Not his military record, not his critique of the government — whether there's an organization forming behind the headlines. Whether there's a platform with numbers in it. Whether there's a list with people who've run things besides military operations.
The broader point is that agility in politics is a feature, not a bug. The ability to form new parties in response to new circumstances is valuable. It's one of the things a proportional system does well. It prevents the kind of sclerosis you see in two-party systems where the existing parties have a duopoly and nobody else can break in. But it only works if the agility is paired with the discipline to build something that lasts.
Otherwise you get what we've been getting. A new party every cycle, a new promise every campaign, and the same structural problems year after year. The housing crisis doesn't get solved because the housing minister changes every eighteen months. The education system doesn't improve because the platform it's running on was written in two days by someone who couldn't get a callback from a single expert.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer, Hilbert Flumingtop.
If you want to send us a question like Daniel did, you can email the show at show at my weird prompts dot com. We'll be back soon.
