Herzog to name who forms Israel's next government after Eisenkot wins majority backing
Israel's President Isaac Herzog said he will name a candidate to form the next government by Sunday after Knesset consultations left opposition leader and former military chief Gadi Eisenkot with 67 recommendations to Benjamin Netanyahu's 46, Al Jazeera reports, citing AP and AFP. Arab-led parties, including the Joint List, recommended Eisenkot while saying they would support an alternative from outside any coalition; Eisenkot, like Netanyahu, has ruled out bringing them into government. The October 27 election left no bloc with a clear 61-seat majority, so the nominee will have 28 days, plus a possible extension, to assemble a cabinet that can win confidence. Read at Al Jazeera (AP/AFP) →
The Glorious Revolution and the invitation to William of Orange
What happened then
On 30 June 1688 seven English leaders — later called the Immortal Seven — wrote to William of Orange inviting him to bring a force to England to defend “religion, liberties and properties” against what they saw as James II's slide toward absolute Catholic monarchy. William landed at Brixham in November; James fled to France.
What caused it
James's policies — a standing army, Catholic appointments and the birth of a male heir who threatened a lasting Catholic succession — had alienated Whigs and many Tories. The invitation was a calculated bid to place a Protestant military leader with a claim through his wife Mary on the throne by parliamentary and elite consent rather than by pure conquest.
How it was resolved
Convention Parliament declared the throne vacant and offered the crown jointly to William and Mary under conditions that became the Bill of Rights 1689: regular parliaments, free elections, no suspending of laws by royal fiat, and limits on a peacetime standing army without consent.
How it turned out
The settlement did not end faction, but it locked in the principle that executive power in England rested on an invitation the political nation could withdraw. Later ages read 1688 as a model — contested then and now — of transferring authority after deadlock without a general civil war.
What the philosophers say
Writing before 1688, and executed in 1683 for alleged treason, Algernon Sidney argued in Discourses Concerning Government that political authority is a trust for the people's good, not a personal estate. Magistrates who betray that trust, he held, may be resisted; free nations choose and constrain those who command armies and make law. His republican insistence that power must answer to consent — not merely to birth or force — became part of the intellectual weather of the Revolution Settlement and of later constitution-making. When a president weighs rival recommendations after an inconclusive election, Sidney's question still fits: who can actually form a government that the political community will own, and on what terms of liberty?
Sources: Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government (Constitution Society) · Wikipedia: Algernon Sidney
Sources: Avalon Project: English Bill of Rights 1689 · British Library: The Bill of Rights 1689 · Wikipedia: Glorious Revolution
Further reading: 1688: The First Modern Revolution by Steve Pincus