MK Compares Yesh Atid to North Korea

Sanctions imposed on MK Adi Kol (Yesh Atid) on Wednesday for breaking ranks on the Governance Law vote led MK Yitzchak Cohen (Shas) to compare party chairman Yair Lapid’s rule to the dictatorship in North Korea.

“In Yesh Atid they did to Adi Kol what is done to some members of parliament in North Korea,” Cohen said in a Knesset speech.

Actually, Kol herself made the comparison in an interview with Haaretz a month ago. She complained that it’s difficult to find her place in an organization that reminds her of North Korea, “where the only voice heard is that of the ruler.”

Kol was suspended by her party from membership in Knesset committees and from proposing laws until further notice as a punishment for abstaining from the vote on the Governance Law, which was advanced by the Netanyahu-Lapid coalition.

A few minutes after the vote on the contentious bill to raise the electoral threshold from two to four percent and make it more difficult to mount no-confidence motions, Kol was forced to apologize publicly for violating coalition discipline.

“That was a decision that harmed mainly members of my faction, and I apologize,” she said.

Kol had been outspoken in her opposition to the governability law. “At the moment we need only four MKs to block one of the most dangerous laws ever seen here,” she wrote in a statement.

In response, Labor party leaders Yachimovich and Herzog offered to let Kol use their private bills quota.

“The Labor faction will allocate to MK Kol, whenever she so desires, a quota of private bills in order to help her to bring her world view to parliamentary and public expression,” they said. “We will honor any request by MK Kol because we respect her world view and object to the attempt to silence her.”

This article appeared in print on page 6 of the August 2nd, 2013 edition of Hamodia.