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Likud leader and former PM Benjamin Netanyahu, late Tuesday. (AP)
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Israeli Labor party leader Amir Peretz hugs Pirkha Hermel, 85, a holocaust survivor, before going to vote, Tuesday. (AP)
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Members of the Israeli pensioners party from right: Yitzhak Ziv, Yaacov Ben-Izri, Rafi Eitan and Moshe Sharon sit on bench in Tel Aviv, Monday (AP)
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Avigdor Lieberman, head of the Israel is Our Home party, talks to supporters, Sunday. (AP)
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| By Israel Insider staff and partners March 29, 2006 |
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Leaders of the hawkish Likud said the results of Tuesday's election, based on TV projections, spell disaster for their party, for three decades Israel's ruling faction but now relegated to the ranks of small parties in the new parliament.
The projections showed Likud gaining only 11 seats in the 120-seat parliament, down from 38 in the outgoing house. Most of its voters followed Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to his new party, Kadima, and stayed even after Sharon was felled by a stroke on Jan. 4.
The projections showed Likud receiving even fewer seats than pre-election polls predicted, leaving it as just the fifth largest party in the parliament. Likud leaders expected to do much better.
Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud leader, admitted that his party "suffered a hard blow," but he pledged to help it recover.
Others hinted the abrasive Netanyahu might pay the price of the failure by losing his leadership position.
Correspondent Robert Rosenberg of the Haaretz daily wrote that with his crushing defeat, Netanyahu is forced to turn over leadership of Israel's right to Avigdor Lieberman, whose Yisrael Beitenu party outpolled Likud.
But Netanyahu "blamed Sharon, the press, even the public, for not understanding his message. The one person he did not blame for the Likud's failure was himself," Rosenberg wrote.
Netanyahu, the U.S.-educated former diplomat, was Israel's prime minister from 1996-1999, when he was trounced in an election by Labor's Ehud Barak. Netanyahu has been making a steady comeback since then, serving as Sharon's finance minister. But he quit the government two weeks before the summer pullout from Gaza, saying he could not take responsibility for the unilateral withdrawal.
His departure put him at the head of the rebel Likud camp against Sharon, eventually leading to Sharon's abandoning Likud and forming Kadima.
Netanyahu is left at the head of a small, fringe party. His replacement could make it easier for Likud to join a Kadima-led coalition in setting Israel's final borders.
Sharon bolted Likud in November after despairing of persuading party rebels to accept further territorial pullbacks in the West Bank.
Israeli Labor Party pleased with second-place election finish
Labor Party leaders were pleased but not ecstatic with their second-place finish in Israel's election Tuesday, and appeared to be natural coalition partners for the front-runner, Kadima.
TV projections showed Labor winning 20-22 seats in the 120-seat parliament, about 10 behind Kadima, which is led by acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Amir Peretz, chosen Labor Party leader in November, tried to focus the campaign on domestic issues instead of security and the Palestinians, but was only partially successful.
"The work is not over today. Today the work is just beginning," he told supporters at party headquarters in Or Yehuda, a working class suburb of Tel Aviv. "Today the Labor Party is beginning its work on behalf of the state."
However, the party's second-place showing put it in a strong position to help form the new government social policy, said Labor candidate Collete Avital.
"I feel that Labor is regained its credibility," she said. "It means we're a serious party that can make serious demands" in coalition negotiations.
Former Labor Cabinet minister Matan Vilnai said Labor "will be a major factor in the next government, and more importantly, this is finally a real opportunity to have a stable, long-lasting government in Israel."
Israel has had five general elections in the last 10 years.
Peretz's victory in November led elder statesman Shimon Peres to bolt the party after half a century and join Ariel Sharon in forming Kadima. Sharon was felled by a stroke on Jan. 4 and remains in a coma.
Many felt Peres' presence would have added to Labor's electoral strength. Despite polls accurately predicting the party's showing, many expected to do much better. That was reflected in a relatively subdued atmosphere at party headquarters.
Many looked forward to Labor' serving in the government. Venture capitalist Erel Margalit was hopeful. "It looks like the next government will be Labor and Kadima, and many in the business community feel that this is the right mix," he said.
Peretz promoted a socialist-style solution to poverty and growing gaps between rich and poor, while Olmert has favored a free market system.
Pensioners become kingmakers with surprisingly strong showing
A pensioners' party headed by a former spymaster who oversaw a sensational espionage operation against the U.S. became a potential kingmaker in Israel's parliamentary elections, exit polls showed.
The GIL party - Hebrew for age, but also the Hebrew acronym for "Israeli pensioners for parliament" - captured five to eight of the legislature's 120 seats, according to exit polls. Its strong showing could hand Olmert the solid majority he needs to carry out his planned pullbacks.
GIL chairman Rafi Eitan, 79, was the Mossad operative who handled Jonathan Pollard, the U.S. Navy analyst convicted of spying for Israel. At party headquarters on Tuesday, activists hoisted posters demanding that the U.S. free Pollard, who has served 21 years of a life sentence.
The party platform does not mention Pollard. But in a recent interview to the Yediot Ahronot newspaper's Web site, Eitan said his decision to recruit an agent to spy on Israel's staunchest ally was his decision alone.
"I took complete, absolute responsibility," he said. "I decided to take the risk, which was clear to me, although I didn't predict the affair would develop to such an extent."
Eitan said Tuesday that he would ally with any coalition that would address his constituency's issues.
"We will sit in any government or coalition that allows us to carry out our agenda and attain our goals of helping pensioners," he said.
Kadima officials said Olmert wouldn't have any problem forming a coalition because the pensioners would join.
But GIL's party's No. 2 candidate, Yaacov Izri, said "no promise was made to any party, to any person in any party. We are not in any party's pocket."
Politicians from other parties interpreted GIL's upset victory as a protest vote.
The party said it speaks for 750,000 Israelis of retirement age in this country of 7 million, but it apparently received a boost from voters not yet eligible to retire. A well-known Israeli comedian, Eli Yatzpan, who is decades away from joining the pensioners' ranks, recently told his audience that he would cast his ballot for GIL.
Natalie Ramati, 26, said she voted for the pensioners' party because it aimed to help people on the fringes of society. "I try to vote for the least of the evils," said Ramati, who cast her ballot in Tel Aviv with her mother, who also went with the pensioners.
Shelly Yachimovitch, campaign head for Labor's Tel Aviv office, said on Tuesday she had noticed a pattern at Tel Aviv polling stations of people choosing to vote this year for Pensioners.
"I found myself convincing people to switch their vote from Pensioners to Labor, rather than from Kadima to Labor," she was quoted as saying on the Web site of the Haaretz daily.
Politician who wants to swap Arabs for Jews becomes major political force
A party that wants fewer Arabs and more Jews inside Israel's borders emerged as a major political force from Israeli elections, turning from a marginal group with just two seats to parliament's third-largest faction, exit polls showed.
Party chairman Avigdor Lieberman drew much of his support from the 1 million immigrants from the former Soviet Union who want a leader with a strong stand on security issues.
Lieberman was born in the former Soviet republic of Moldova and served as a former top aide to Benjamin Netanyahu when he was prime minister in the late 1990s.
Lieberman wants to redraw Israel's map by transferring many Israeli Arab towns to Palestinian jurisdiction and annexing large Jewish settlements in the West Bank to Israel.
"We have made our position clear - security and a Jewish state," he said. "We will not be party to anything that does not help implement these two concepts, security and a Jewish state. If they want us as partners to restore security and ensure a Jewish state, we will be partners. We will not agree to anything else."
Some 1.4 million of Israel's 7 million citizens are Arabs. With such a large minority, Israel cannot continue to be a Jewish state, says Lieberman, who opposes acting Olmert's plan of withdrawing from much of Judea and Samaria.
Lieberman is the first leader of a high-profile party to espouse a population swap. Israeli human rights activists and Arab politicians have denounced his agenda as racist.
The exit polls also showed Olmert becoming Israel's next leader, elected on a platform of sacrificing "small" settlements in Judea and Samaria, while annexing major settlement blocs.
Lieberman, who lives in the Nokdim settlement likely marked for removal under Olmert's plan, has not ruled out joining an Olmert-led government.
After exit polls were released on Tuesday, Lieberman declared that "pullbacks cannot be anyone's goal," but pronounced himself open to considering joining a coalition with Olmert.
Lieberman also said Israel could not accept increasingly sophisticated Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, which security forces reported on Tuesday.
"I'm not prepared to accept Katyusha rockets falling on Israeli cities or that we would accept a situation of a terrorist government and a reality of Katyushas," he said, referring to the recent ascent to power of violently anti-Israel Hamas militants in the Palestinian Authority.
At campaign headquarters, supporters sang a song about Jerusalem in Russian, and, clapping hands, chanted, "Da, da, Lieberman" - an allusion to his Russian-language campaign slogan that proclaimed, "Olmert, no, Netanyahu, no, Lieberman, "da," or yes.
AP contributed to this report.
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