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Kadima's lead is slipping
A steady attrition of popular support for Israel's new Kadima party is adding spice to what had been shaping up to be one of the blandest election campaigns in recent memory.
- By Harvey Morris, Financial Times
- Published: 23:32 May 3, 2009
A steady attrition of popular support for Israel's new Kadima party is adding spice to what had been shaping up to be one of the blandest election campaigns in recent memory.
For most of the four months since Kadima was established, its electoral victory looked a foregone conclusion. With three weeks to go until election day on March 28, opinion polls still show it winning the largest number of seats in the 120-member Knesset.
However, its lead over rival parties is narrowing, placing strains on what began as a loose coalition assembled by Ariel Sharon, Kadima's founder, and which now seeks to present a coherent and unified strategy under Ehud Olmert, his successor.
With Kadima's campaign faltering, some of its leading spokespeople have been markedly off-message as the party moves to fend off challenges from both right and left in the final weeks of the electoral race.
After living through last year's hot political summer, in which Israel society survived unscathed from an evacuation of Gaza that rightists had warned would split the nation, the electorate proved remarkably resilient in the face of equally unsettling dramas that were to follow.
When Sharon announced in November he was quitting the ruling Likud to form a new centrist bloc, voters took the political upheaval in their stride, immediately granting Kadima a commanding lead in opinion polls.
Dismissed by its rivals as a one-man party, Kadima survived the political demise of the prime minister who, within 40 days of founding it, fell into a coma from which he has yet to wake.
Even the victory of Hamas in January's Palestinian elections, which the right now says Olmert should never have allowed to go ahead, failed initially to register more than a minor blip in surveys of voter intentions.
The latest series of polls, however, indicate that Kadima support is slipping. A joint Channel 10-Haaretz poll showed Olmert's party winning 37 seats, down from 39 seats a week earlier and from a high point of 44 in January.
Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing Likud gained a seat to secure a predicted 15, while Amir Peretz's Labour party held steady at 19. Some voters shifted to smaller rightwing and other minority parties that, despite their size, frequently play a determining role in post-election coalition-building.
Speculation
The figures have given rise to speculation about the unlikely scenario of a Likud-Labour coalition that would freeze out Kadima, although commentators acknowledge its only political logic would be to allow Netanyahu and Peretz to cheat Olmert of the premiership.
Analysts partially explained Kadima's slide by pointing to much publicised allegations that Olmert paid an artificially low rent for continuing to live in a house he had sold to a US businessman. The attorney-general ruled there were no grounds for a corruption investigation.
Opinion polls, however, suggested alleged corruption was only a small factor in the reversal of Kadima's fortunes. Only 2 per cent of those polled by the daily Yedioth Aharonoth said the reports had persuaded them to drop their support for Kadima, indicating the true causes of voter unease lie elsewhere.
A broadly supportive press has started to find fault with Olmert's leadership after a period of grace he was accorded as acting prime minister in the immediate aftermath of Sharon's illness.
Having failed to secure the total international isolation of an in-coming Hamas government, Kadima officials have floated a number of sometimes conflicting assessments of how they would deal in future with the Palestinians.
Tzipi Livni, foreign minister, caused a stir when she called Mahmoud Abbas, the PA's Fatah president "irrelevant" at a time when other party leaders, notably the veteran Shimon Peres, were describing him as a man with whom Israel could do business.
The public has been left equally confused about Kadima's plans for the West Bank, with some officials promoting and others decrying the concept of unilateral withdrawals.
Olmert has sought to calm fears that future withdrawals would encourage terrorism, only to have the defence establishment cite recent isolated stabbing and firebomb attacks to make gloomy assessments that a third Palestinian uprising was in the offing.
As things stand, Olmert is still favourite to become the next prime minister. But, as the Hamas upset in the Palestinian elections illustrated, opinion poll results are no guarantee of victory.
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