Israel Matzav: Heh... Livni's 'Movement' to win 7 seats... at the expense of other Center-Left parties

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Heh... Livni's 'Movement' to win 7 seats... at the expense of other Center-Left parties

My apologies to those of you who are Hebrew impaired and will not understand the humor in Zippi Livni's new party logo and voting slips.... Okay - if you read to the bottom of this post you'll get it.

Isn't this rich? As reported on Tuesday, Tzipi Livni, who perpetrated the current Right wing government in the first place by refusing to even talk to Prime Minister Netanyahu about a coalition with her Kadima party unless she could have a rotation as Prime Minister, has formed a new party, HaTnua, the 'Movement.' (That's not what it says in the graphic. The graphic calls her new party HaBdicha, the Joke). We now have the results of the first survey taken since Livni made her announcement, and wow, Livni's new party will win seven seats if she can find six other people to run with her. There's just one small problem.... Those seats all come from other parties in the 'Center-Left.' They do nothing to change the fact that the Right is likely to win the election.

The survey, published in Haaretz on Wednesday, predicts that Livni’s new The Movement party will win seven seats in the next Knesset and that the seats will come at the expense of Labor hopefuls and the political newcomers that make up Yair Lapid’s new Yesh Atid party list.

The poll shows that Livni’s announcement cost both Labor and Yesh Atid five seats each, compared to predictions from a Channel 10 poll published October 29. Seven of the lost seats went to Livni and the remaining votes went to Meretz, that according to the Haaretz poll will win five seats, and to other small left-wing parties. Labor, led by Shelly Yachmiovich, will now win 18 seats and Yesh Atid just eight, the poll predicted.

The biggest loser from the pre-election maneuvering is Kadima, the party formerly led by Livni. The survey predicted that Kadima will tumble from 28 seats that it held in the recently disbanded Knesset to just two seats in the next, meaning it would fail to pass the minimum threshold needed to ensure the party’s entrance to the Knesset.

Livni said on Tuesday that she was establishing The Movement as an alternative to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s dominance over the political arena. However, the survey asking who Israelis prefer to see in the prime minister’s office found the 66% of voters believe he is the right man for the job, and only 21% would put Livni in his place.

...

In total, center-right, right and religious parties have a predicted 69 seats in the next Knesset compared to just 51 seats for the center-left together with Arab parties.

Those last couple of words are really significant. While we have and have always had Arab MK's as part of the mainstream parties, there has never been an Arab party in any coalition. That means that the real balance in the Knesset is 69-40 or 41, which is even more tilted Right than it is today.

What could go wrong?

P.S. The three slips at the bottom of the graphic are voting slips. The way we vote here is that after you show your identification card with your picture on it, you are given an envelope and sent behind a curtain to a polling place that has slips with one or two letters on it to represent each party (the slips are contained in a tray, with each party having its own compartment). You pick the slip of the party you want to vote for, put it in the envelope, seal the envelope, and then exit the polling booth and put the envelope in a box. Like this:

The voting slips in the graphic above all have the letter Heth. Writing Heth, Heth, Heth in Hebrew is like writing Hah! Hah! Hah! in English....

So I explained the graphic....

Labels: Binyamin Netanyahu, Knesset elections 2013, Tzipi Livni