Yossi Lapid. (AP file)
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| By: Associated Press |
| Published: January 26, 2006 |
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The leader of the Shinui Party said Wednesday he is quitting the group, after Shinui's ruling council dumped most of the party's serving parliament members from its list of electoral candidates and polls showed it plummeting into political oblivion.
Contentious ex-journalist Joseph Lapid told a press conference that he was proud of the party's meteoric rise from two parliamentary seats in the 1980s to its present 15, but he also acknowledged Shinui's fall from grace since Prime Minister Ariel Sharon left the conservative Likud party and formed his own center party, Kadima.
Polls now predict Shinui - which describes itself as liberal and secular - dwindling to between three and five seats in scheduled March elections, with Kadima leading the field at 40 seats or more.
"I decided with real regret to resign my post as chairman of the Shinui party, head of Shinui's parliamentary list, and as a member of Shinui," Lapid said. "If I earned no small part of the credit for Shinui's gains I must take upon myself responsibility for the party's current collapse."
He said that if the deposed lawmakers decided to form a breakaway party he might join them.
Shinui - Hebrew for "change" - was founded in 1974 as part of a peace movement that grew in response to the traumatic Middle East war of the year before.
Lapid re-branded the party away from the left and focused on fierce opposition to the ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties who took plum posts and generous government funding as the price for the support of successive Likud and Labor-led coalition governments.
With Kadima now claiming the center ground and seen as likely to be able to form a viable coalition without the religious parties, the Shinui's relevance is fading fast and even its own leaders acknowledge that most of its supporters have defected to Kadima.
"A part of my life is over and completed," Lapid, 74, said Wednesday. "A part of which I am proud." |
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