Kadima hares forward to March

[IndianaGreen]

Sat., February 11, 2006 Shvat 13, 5766

Kadima hares forward to March

By Yossi Verter

If say, we were to wake up from a three-month coma and rush to open a newspaper, we would conclude that there was never an election race as boring and lacking in dramas as this one. What does the graph tell us? That one party, Kadima, has taken over the agenda and the middle of the map and it has securely led and is securely leading in unruffled tranquillity, without upsets, with two satellite parties trailing behind it: Likud and Labor, and both of them are fighting for second place, apparently unrelated to what is happening with the big sister.

Then we look at the illustrations and the small print, which tell an entirely different story, of an election race full of swings and ups and downs, like a ghost train. Only the ghosts have come and gone without disturbing anyone, leaving no impression on the voters. Perhaps here and there, in the margins, they have added three or four Knesset seats to Labor or the Likud. But they have barely affected Kadima: not Ariel Sharon?s stroke, not the Hamas victory, not Labor Party chairman MK Amir Peretz's social agenda and not the democratic procedures in the other two parties. Not even the positioning of one of the less-liked politicians in the country at the head of Kadima.

Ostensibly, each one of these events should have taken a big bite out of Kadima. Not only has this not happened, the graph relates that since Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert stepped into Sharon?s shoes, Kadima has only been going from strength to strength. When Peretz was chosen to head the party, Labor won 27 Knesset seats in the survey. Now it is limping, with great effort, around the 21 mark, after it had gone down to 16. When MK Benjamin Netanyahu was elected chairman of the Likud, the surveys predicted 12 Knesset seats for him. Now, the Haaretz poll is expecting 15 seats for him (if the elections were held today).

Three Knesset seats in three months. This is what Netanyahu has brought the Likud and this is what is raising the question occupying senior Likud people: Are the voters not coming home because of Netanyahu, despite Netanyahu, or with no connection at all to Netanyahu? Has the public tired of the Likud because of his policy, despite his policy, or because there is a creature called Kadima, which is promising hope for an end to the conflict? Does exhausted, bleary-eyed Israel want to finish and leave, and if so, what is left for the Likud to do? Caution? Warn? Okay, we'll caution. We'll warn. But darn it, how do we do this without sounding like pests?

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=681101&contrassID=2&subContrassID=15&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y