AxisMundi Jerusalem

The comeback kid?

Team of rivals for Israel?

Coalition-building in the aftermath of Israel’s inconclusive Feb. 10 election kicks into high gear on Wednesday, when the final results become official and President Shimon Peres begins sounding out party leaders on whom he should appoint to try to form the next administration.

To recap: neither the centrist Kadima party led by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni nor Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud won enough seats for a majority in the 120-member parliament. Kadima took 28 seats to Likud’s 27, but Netanyahu could stand a better chance of getting the nod from Peres because he is likely to have the support of a majority right-wing bloc of 65 legislators.

Can Israel do a power-share?

A predawn victory party for Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni had all the trappings of a fairytale, including a ballroom setting in a Tel Aviv hotel.

The woman who had edged ahead of rival Benjamin Netanyahu in a national election stood to become Israel’s first woman prime minister in 30 years, and she had surely beaten the odds to get there, just weeks after polls predicted a resounding defeat for her centrist Kadima party.

“This is truly amazing, the public has had its say and it’s Tzipi,” Yaacov Edri, a former cabinet minister from Kadima, told me as supporters broke out in song and dance, proclaiming Livni as “queen of Israel,” and waving blue and red party flags.

A hip-hop style ode to the centrist party leader blared from loudspeakers.

Livni, flashing a triumphant V sign with her fingers called it “a wonderful day for Israel,” and said “the Israeli people have chosen Kadima and we will respect that choice by forming the next government, headed by Kadima.”

It didn’t take long for it to sink in for many that Livni’s victory celebration may have been premature. Netanyahu, whose right-wing Likud party trailed Kadima by only one seat in the 120-member parliament, also claimed victory, saying parties belonging to the “nationalist camp” had secured a governing majority.

“It’s not going to be easy at all,” Edri remarked about Livni’s chances of pulling together a coalition.Her first order of business may have to be implementing an electoral reform plan that whittles down the number of parties running in Israeli elections from the incredible 30 that took part in this latest contest.

I won! No, I did…

It’s a recipe for trouble and it will be down to Israel’s veteran president, 85-year-old Shimon Peres to sort it out. In sum, Livni of the ruling Kadima centrists, has a one-seat lead over former premier Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud. But neither party has as much as a quarter of the seats in the Knesset. Cue possibly weeks of haggling among the parties on forming a coalition government. By tradition, Peres ought to ask the leader of the biggest party – thus far, Livni – to try and build a cabinet first. But Netanyahu, rejecting her offer of joining her in a national unity government, says that overall the new parliament has a right-wing majority and that he is therefore in the better position to forge a stable administration.

Peres is no stranger to Israel’s convoluted coalition arithmetic. In 1984, he agreed to one of the weirdest election outcomes seen when, as left-wing Labour party leader, he did a deal with Yitzhak Shamir of Likud whereby the two spent two years each as prime minister during the four-year term of the parliament. There has been talk again today of the famous “rotation”, though few remember it with much fondness and recall a time of general political stalemate. Anxious to push for peace in the Middle East after Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip last month, new U.S. President Barack Obama will be among those concerned at the gridlock.

Also likely to get more attention in the coming days may be perennial talk of electoral reform in Israel, notably restricting seats in parliament to fewer parties in an effort to promote larger, more stable blocs. Avigdor Lieberman, the far-right Russian-speaking immigrant whose Yisrael Beiteinu party leapt past Labour into third place, proposes raising the threshold for winning seats in parliament from the present 2 percent to 5 percent – a level in line with, for example, Germany, where 5 parties currently sit in parliament compared with the dozen expected to have seats in the Knesset. The Israeli parliament’s web site notes some of the other ideas for electoral reform that have been discussed. The complex party matrix is, however, an obstacle in itself to reform of that system.

Lieberman, a potential kingmaker whose rhetoric has alarmed Arabs at home and abroad, also wants a strong presidency for Israel to cut through decades of deadlock as he sees it. For now, the president has few clear-cut powers beyond the ceremonial. But Peres (right), who has been a leading political figure throughout Israel’s 60-year history, now finds himself with potentially enormous influence in his choice of who will form the next government. Without a written constitution, he has a variety of laws, parliamentary regulations and 60 years of tradition to consider as he looks for a solution.

Confused? So must Peres be as he tries to untangle what the Yedioth headline calls the ”Political Knot”.

(PICTURES: Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper front page, Feb 11, 2009. REUTERS/Kineret Kaufman; Israeli President Shimon Peres looks through binoculars. www.president.co.il )

It ain’t over

A lesser blog than this one might resort to some trite cliche about how ‘it ain’t over until the fat lady sings’.

We will refrain – but it is tempting.

Despite taking the most Knesset seats according to exit polls after Israelis went to the polls – Tzipi Livni is still a long way from being anointed as Israel’s new Prime Minister.

Israeli exit polls – like tonight’s that give Livni a two seat lead over her rival Benjamin Netanyahu - have foxed us in the past.

In the primary elections for Livni’s Kadima party last year – the first exit polls had her leading her rival Shaul Mofaz by a significant margin. As the night wore on it became evident that the two were much, much closer than originally thought to the extent that there were some calls for a recount.

What is it about elections….?

What is it about elections that gets the creative juices flowing among TV executives and their technology departments?

Brits (of a certain age), like myself, will purr with nostalgic glee looking at this video that charts the history of the fabled ‘swingometer’ – stalwart of election night coverage over the years. The excitement triggered by the  arrival of computers – sometime in the 1970s – is obvious on the face of the presenters! Priceless.

Last year’s US elections brought the genre bang up to date with the famous hologram interview on CNN between anchor Wolf Blitzer in Atlanta and his colleague Jessica Yellin live from Chicago.

At least, the technologists would have you believe they’d advanced the science. To many of us the whole affair looked more like a throwback – to Princess Leah’s appeal for help projected as a hologram by R2-D2 to Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars movie - also from the 1970s.

Tzipi Livni – man of the moment?

Sex has rarely been far from centre-stage in an otherwise low-key campaign for Israel’s election on Tuesday. The fact that the ruling Kadima party leader Tzipi Livni is a woman has, however, been largely debated by allusion and suggestion, often in a  far from gentlemanly way in the still macho world of Israeli politics. So it’s striking then, in the campaign’s final days, to see Livni herself, bidding to become the country’s first woman leader since Golda Meir in the 1970s, putting the issue front and centre. Take a look at this poster, photographed in Jerusalem by my colleague Jerry Lampen.  It reads, in French, “Tzipi Livni – Man of the Moment”, or perhaps “The Right Man for the Job”. It looks like a direct response to repeated attacks from right-wing opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu especially that “she” is not ready to lead a country facing threats on numerous fronts. “She’s not up to the job,” runs one ad from Netanyahu’s Likud party. It shows Livni, slumped, with her head in her hands.

On Tuesday at 10 p.m.  (2000 GMT) we should know if Livni has been able to turn around Netanyahu’s opinion poll lead. Even if she does, it is not guaranteed that she can form a coalition government. The reason this election is being held over a year early is because Livni, taking over from the corruption-hit Ehud Olmert, was unable to cobble together a workable coalition. As my colleague Jeffrey Heller had predicted when she took over her party’s leadership, many believed the former soldiers running the other leading parties found it hard to accept her. Some saw the refusal of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party to join her cabinet as a reflection of religious sexism. That wasn’t the official reason. But Livni, a secular denizen of liberal Tel Aviv, did go out of her way, unsuccessfully as it turned out, to appeal to religious tradition. She donned monochrome clothing and swapped her favoured pant suits for long skirts when meeting Shas leaders. Even so, the Orthodox press would not even print her picture. They would airbrush her out of group photos. Or, as for other women, they might photoshop her into “a tree, or something”, one journalist at an ultra-Orthodox paper told my colleague Dan Williams.

Livni seems to have been reluctant to “play the woman card” early in the campaign, focusing on her record. But observers have detected a clear strategy to play the men at their own game. Both Netanyahu and Labour party leader Ehud Barak were commandos, Barak indeed is Israel’s most decorated soldier. Livni has pushed her family credentials – her parents were famed guerrilla fighters against the British and Arabs in the 1940s – and her own shadowy past in the Mossad intelligence agency. This TV ad showing a pixellated figure intones a list of career highlights down the years: “… he served in the Mossad … he served as foreign minister…” and so on. “No one would doubt he could lead the government.” Then the figure is revealed as Livni and the narrator says, “If only he wasn’t… a woman.” Hitting back at snide chauvinistic comments that, as a Mossad agent in Paris in the early 1980s she did only menial chores, Livni told an audience in Tel Aviv last week: “I make decisions, not coffee.”

With the poll gap narrowing sharply in the final days, the gender issue could be crucial.  Rina Bar-Tal, chairwoman of the Israel Women’s Network,  told my colleague Allyn Fisher-Ilan that Likud’s poster jibe at Livni that “the job is too big for her” – with clear emphasis on the final pronoun - could backfire on Netanyahu. Bar-Tal said: ”There are women who pass by these posters and say, ‘I wasn’t going to vote for her but I certainly will now.’”

So is Tzipi Livni the man of the hour? If she makes it through, she can always recall what Israel’s founding father David Ben-Gurion said of Golda Meir: “She’s the only man in the cabinet.”

http://blogs.reuters.com/global/2008/09/21/tzipi-livni-as-israels-next-golda-meir-well-not-so-fast/

A yawning gap

With just two days to go before Israel’s general election, opinion polls show more than a quarter of the electorate is still undecided.

Call it the yawning gap in an election race that’s largely been one big snooze.

Israelis could be forgiven for failing to be energised by a lacklustre campaign waged by familiar faces and interrupted by a 22-day offensive in the Gaza Strip. Political positions are well-known and well-entrenched.

Big campaign rallies have become a tiresome thing of the past in a country that has held five national elections in the past 10 years. But the leading candidates have been hitting the campaign trail harder in recent days.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, head of the ruling, centrist Kadima party, played DJ during a visit to a dance club in Tel Aviv.

from Global News Journal:

Israel goes to the polls via the internet

Its election time in Israel which, despite the weighty issues at stake, is always something of a let-down for people who like a bit of U.S. style political pageantry.

There are few, if any, stump speeches, rallies, debates. There is, however, blanket campaigning in the traditional media and of course on the internet as well. Here are a few campaign ads from the internet kicking off with Ehud Barak and his Labour Party.

Like all the major candidates Barak has his own website from where you can link to dedicated pages on YouTube, Facebook, Flickr et al.

Tzipi Livni's Kadima Party are no new-media slouches either and have used every trick in the video editing manual to depict opponent Benjamin Netanyahu as a man prone to panic.

Right-wing party Yisrael Beytenu has seen its standings improve in recent polls and goes with a fairly straight-forward approach on one of its big election themes, demanding something be done about Israeli Arab lawmakers whose loyalty to a Jewish State of Israel is open to question.