Kadima Primaries
Leave a Bad Taste in Everyone’s Mouth.
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni,
who is now working to reconstitute Ehud Olmert’s Parliamentary coalition and take his place as
Prime Minister, won Kadima’s primaries by just 431
votes — 1.1% of the total. The loser, Shaul Mofaz, declined to challenge the results, but some of his
supporters are doing so. They have launched an appeal in Kadima’s
internal court, but this is merely a preliminary. If they lose there they will
undoubtedly appeal to Tel Aviv District Court. If they win, Kadima
will have to do its primaries over again. Even if the result is the same — Kadima voters are not likely to be grateful to Mofaz for shlepping them
to the polls again —
While there seem to have been
irregularities at a few polling places, nobody is accusing the central election
authorities of Kadima of wrongdoing. They may,
however, have mismanaged the elections, taking controversial decisions that in
retrospect will prove to have been mistakes. In the early evening they decided
to leave the polls open for an extra half hour, till 10:30. As is often the
case in elections, the outcome was widely believed to depend on the turnout; a
larger turnout favored Livni, who in the end just
squeaked by. According to the chairman of Kadima’s
election commission, both candidates’ campaigns complained of lengthy lines at
the polls and importuned him to make it possible for more people to vote. Was
extending the polling day the right answer? In a race so close, did the extra
half hour cause victory to pass from Mofaz’ camp to Livni’s? No one will ever know.
To add to the injury, the media
failed to take into account the extension of the polling day and published exit
polls at 10:15 in the evening, when many voters were still waiting in line. The
exit polls showed Livni with a decisive lead. By
morning the polls were proven wrong, but nobody knows how many Mofaz supporters decided to give up and go home at the last
minute.
The Knesset Constitution and
Law Committee is rushing work on a bill to prohibit the publication of polls
during the week prior to primary elections; however, the Knesset is not in
session now and there was no way for the bill to become law before Kadima’s primaries were held. A similar law already limits
publishing polls before general elections.
Another source of concern is
the small number of participants in Kadima’s
primaries. In part, this is a reflection
of the small scale of Israeli politics. In the
According to some sources, only
about 10 or 15,000 members of Kadima’s 74,000 members
actually signed up as individuals, most during the initial period of enthusiasm
after the party was formed. The rest came from “vote contractors,” individuals
who sign up friends and acquaintances and market their votes to candidates for
promises of favors and influence. Some of the contractors are the heads of
union locals or of extended Arab families — hamulot — capable of dragooning
thousands of voters into a political party and instructing them how to vote.
It’s hard to call such a system, where votes are bought and sold wholesale,
genuine democracy.
Kadima’s primaries did not work well and have
damaged the reputation of this method of selecting candidates. Among the
solutions proposed is to adopt an open primary system, which is the norm in most
American states. This would greatly increase the pool of potential voters and
limit the influence of vote contractors.
Another proposed “solution” is to eliminate primaries altogether and go
back to the method common in the first decades of