MR Political Roundup - 2006-01-04
First what we do know: First, Ariel Sharon's political career is over. He will not recover fully from this operation, but even a miracle will not allow him to either run for or to execute the duties of an office. Channel 10: "for the next few hours, every Israeli is going to be a doctor. And they're listening to what the real doctors are saying, and that's that Sharon won't be Prime Minster at least for the next few months." Second, there will be elections in Israel on March 28th because last month President Katsav acceded to Prime Minister Sharon's request to dissolve the Knesset. But that's exactly all of we what we know right now.
Before this tragedy, Israel was already in a kind of double political limbo: not only had the Prime Minister just dissolved the government - so the executive and legislative branches were lame ducks - but the lame-duck government itself was controlled by a party that had never been elected. Sharon, having left the Likud party to form Kadima, managed to convince an incredible number of Israeli personalities and ministers to abandon life-long commitments and come with him. Several of the most powerful officials in the Israeli government right now have thus never been elected as members of the party that they're ostensibly members of. But Sharon was on track to guiding Israel through the government-less, party-less limbo. His own personal popularity was going to bring enough votes to ensure that the same people - but not the same party - remained control. After his series of chaotic electoral tricks, Israel was supposed to have a soft landing where everything fell into place without any dramatic changes. But without Sharon holding everything together, Kadima is a party with no base and no infrastructure - and now with nothing to make voters ignore that.
The legal situation is unprecedented. Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert not only takes control of a country that has never voted for him, but he takes over as the representative of a party that he doesn't lead. Kadima has never had a public discussion over who should lead it, let alone a formal primary (Sharon was personally deciding the order of Kadima's election list, and Kadima was supposed to grow party roots during the next government). Adding Sharon's responsibilities to his own previously substantial ones, acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert - a former Likud member who left with Sharon - now holds more cabinet portfolios than the rest of the cabinet combined. Channel 10 asked a legal expert for his opinion about what Israel's bodies of laws says about this situation. Answer: "in my opinion, this is totally beyond the scope of anything the law has to say." Awesome!
In the meantime, politicians across the spectrum are declaring that they're praying for Sharon's fully recovery. And as very-lefty Yossi Beilin said on TV this morning, prayers "aren't nothing". Netanyahu and Peretz mean those prayers. Everyone is very, very nervous about the chaos and uncertainty that Israel is about to face. The Likud has all but officially canceled their plans to resign from the government on Sunday (where they are still technically ministers), while Peretz - who had already taken Labor out of the government - has placed himself "at the disposal" of Olmert.
Kadima
Even while Sharon was healthy, Kadima was a 'virtual party'. It had no elected leader and, to be totally technical, it probably had no actual members. Just a bunch of people who were going to be come members when they were elected in March. Despite this, yesterday morning Israel time brought a poll that showed them winning more than one-third of the Knesset. Now nobody knows.
All of the analysis that we've been hearing this morning links the party's continued viability on Olmert's ability to (a) become powerful very, very quickly and (b) get the party to somehow officially designate him as its leader very, very quickly. Odds that either of those things will happen are difficult to determine - for instance, nobody knows how or where Kadima would hold primaries (or who would vote in them). There are a lot of really talented politicians who have risked their political careers on Kadima, and they probably can't go back to their old parties (Peretz was already stacking Labor with his union friends before Kadima existed, while everyone knows [Netanyahu] to be vindictive and petty). So there are a lot of really big brains with an incentive to make Kadima work.
But even that may well end up being a problem - too many egos and no one able to manage them. On Channel 10, Ariel Doad (definitely misspelled) - presumably an expert - was unequivocal: "Kadima is dead". That may be too quick - Olmert has three months to prove that he's able to lead the country. But he has to act quickly to demonstrate that he's even going to be running as a leader of anything. If he fails, Kadima will either fall apart of appoint someone else as head - someone on Channel 10 just said that Kadima's only option might be Shimon Peres, although some bloggers have been throwing around Shaul Mofaz's name this morning (Jonathan Zasloff, Meryl). We literally have no idea what the election would look like in either of those cases. Certainly Kadima will not get the astronomical mandates they were thinking of just 12 hours ago.
Likud
The Likud is led by Netanyahu, who managed to permanently piss off the party's natural, working class constituency when he was Treasury Minister. Those votes were all supposed to go to Kadima. These are working class people, mostly secular and mostly right-wing. Exactly Kadima's demographic. Now they have to choose to either vote for a middle class party (e.g. Shinui - not working class), or a religious party (e.g. Shas - not secular), or a left-wing party (e.g. Labor - not right-wing). Or they might hold their nose and vote for Netanyahu. But they probably won't do that. Where they will go is anyone's guess.
Likud was supposed to get trounced in the coming election. There was no reason to vote for a right-wing, secular party while Arik Sharon was guiding Israel along a measured but security-minded path. The talk has been that Labor will recover many of the votes they've lost to Kadima in the last weeks, but its the Likud ex-pats who are going to be looking around and scratching their heads.
Labor
Here's the problem with Labor getting back some votes: Amir Peretz can be seen as an Oslo-style, terrorist appeasing, union thug. Not everyone sees him as all of those things, but most people see him as at least one of those things. Labor's fortunes had been dropping precipitously in recent weeks, as voter excitement over a change in Israel's political climate gave way to the realization of what that change was. Security still dominates Israel's agenda, which disadvantages Peretz in two ways - he concerns himself mostly with domestic issues and, when he deigns to discuss foreign policy, it tends to be in terms that... er... do not appeal to people looking for a strong leader. If Olmert comes out of the gate looking strong, it could turn out to be that only a trickle of voters will return to Labor.
Sharon was not the only Israeli alive capable of negotiating the diplomatic and military situation that Israel finds itself in - he was the only one capable of handling the political crises that he put Israel into and that he intended to lead Israel out of. What will happen to the politicians who left careers in other parties to join him - planning to ride his popularity until Kadima could grow roots - is anyone's guess.
Before this tragedy, Israel was already in a kind of double political limbo: not only had the Prime Minister just dissolved the government - so the executive and legislative branches were lame ducks - but the lame-duck government itself was controlled by a party that had never been elected. Sharon, having left the Likud party to form Kadima, managed to convince an incredible number of Israeli personalities and ministers to abandon life-long commitments and come with him. Several of the most powerful officials in the Israeli government right now have thus never been elected as members of the party that they're ostensibly members of. But Sharon was on track to guiding Israel through the government-less, party-less limbo. His own personal popularity was going to bring enough votes to ensure that the same people - but not the same party - remained control. After his series of chaotic electoral tricks, Israel was supposed to have a soft landing where everything fell into place without any dramatic changes. But without Sharon holding everything together, Kadima is a party with no base and no infrastructure - and now with nothing to make voters ignore that.
The legal situation is unprecedented. Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert not only takes control of a country that has never voted for him, but he takes over as the representative of a party that he doesn't lead. Kadima has never had a public discussion over who should lead it, let alone a formal primary (Sharon was personally deciding the order of Kadima's election list, and Kadima was supposed to grow party roots during the next government). Adding Sharon's responsibilities to his own previously substantial ones, acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert - a former Likud member who left with Sharon - now holds more cabinet portfolios than the rest of the cabinet combined. Channel 10 asked a legal expert for his opinion about what Israel's bodies of laws says about this situation. Answer: "in my opinion, this is totally beyond the scope of anything the law has to say." Awesome!
In the meantime, politicians across the spectrum are declaring that they're praying for Sharon's fully recovery. And as very-lefty Yossi Beilin said on TV this morning, prayers "aren't nothing". Netanyahu and Peretz mean those prayers. Everyone is very, very nervous about the chaos and uncertainty that Israel is about to face. The Likud has all but officially canceled their plans to resign from the government on Sunday (where they are still technically ministers), while Peretz - who had already taken Labor out of the government - has placed himself "at the disposal" of Olmert.
Kadima
Even while Sharon was healthy, Kadima was a 'virtual party'. It had no elected leader and, to be totally technical, it probably had no actual members. Just a bunch of people who were going to be come members when they were elected in March. Despite this, yesterday morning Israel time brought a poll that showed them winning more than one-third of the Knesset. Now nobody knows.
All of the analysis that we've been hearing this morning links the party's continued viability on Olmert's ability to (a) become powerful very, very quickly and (b) get the party to somehow officially designate him as its leader very, very quickly. Odds that either of those things will happen are difficult to determine - for instance, nobody knows how or where Kadima would hold primaries (or who would vote in them). There are a lot of really talented politicians who have risked their political careers on Kadima, and they probably can't go back to their old parties (Peretz was already stacking Labor with his union friends before Kadima existed, while everyone knows [Netanyahu] to be vindictive and petty). So there are a lot of really big brains with an incentive to make Kadima work.
But even that may well end up being a problem - too many egos and no one able to manage them. On Channel 10, Ariel Doad (definitely misspelled) - presumably an expert - was unequivocal: "Kadima is dead". That may be too quick - Olmert has three months to prove that he's able to lead the country. But he has to act quickly to demonstrate that he's even going to be running as a leader of anything. If he fails, Kadima will either fall apart of appoint someone else as head - someone on Channel 10 just said that Kadima's only option might be Shimon Peres, although some bloggers have been throwing around Shaul Mofaz's name this morning (Jonathan Zasloff, Meryl). We literally have no idea what the election would look like in either of those cases. Certainly Kadima will not get the astronomical mandates they were thinking of just 12 hours ago.
Likud
The Likud is led by Netanyahu, who managed to permanently piss off the party's natural, working class constituency when he was Treasury Minister. Those votes were all supposed to go to Kadima. These are working class people, mostly secular and mostly right-wing. Exactly Kadima's demographic. Now they have to choose to either vote for a middle class party (e.g. Shinui - not working class), or a religious party (e.g. Shas - not secular), or a left-wing party (e.g. Labor - not right-wing). Or they might hold their nose and vote for Netanyahu. But they probably won't do that. Where they will go is anyone's guess.
Likud was supposed to get trounced in the coming election. There was no reason to vote for a right-wing, secular party while Arik Sharon was guiding Israel along a measured but security-minded path. The talk has been that Labor will recover many of the votes they've lost to Kadima in the last weeks, but its the Likud ex-pats who are going to be looking around and scratching their heads.
Labor
Here's the problem with Labor getting back some votes: Amir Peretz can be seen as an Oslo-style, terrorist appeasing, union thug. Not everyone sees him as all of those things, but most people see him as at least one of those things. Labor's fortunes had been dropping precipitously in recent weeks, as voter excitement over a change in Israel's political climate gave way to the realization of what that change was. Security still dominates Israel's agenda, which disadvantages Peretz in two ways - he concerns himself mostly with domestic issues and, when he deigns to discuss foreign policy, it tends to be in terms that... er... do not appeal to people looking for a strong leader. If Olmert comes out of the gate looking strong, it could turn out to be that only a trickle of voters will return to Labor.
Sharon was not the only Israeli alive capable of negotiating the diplomatic and military situation that Israel finds itself in - he was the only one capable of handling the political crises that he put Israel into and that he intended to lead Israel out of. What will happen to the politicians who left careers in other parties to join him - planning to ride his popularity until Kadima could grow roots - is anyone's guess.
