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Down To The Wire,
Israel's
national
elections are
on Tuesday.
And the
most likely
winner is the
status quo.
ZE'EV CHAFETS
Special to the Jewish News
ir
l el Aviv — As the Israeli national elec-
tion enters its final days, the two ma-
jor parties and their allies appear to
be in a dead heat, according to poll-
sters. Strangely, however, the hot
contest has been getting the cold
shoulder from the public in what is generally consid-
ered the dullest campaign ever held here.
Campaign rallies have been poorly attended and
notably lacking in enthusiasm. Both the Likud and
Labor have been forced to cancel dozens of candidate
parlor meetings across the country. And, in the first
election since Israel has been hooked up to cable tele-
vision, most viewers have been watching MTV, Eu-
ropean football or "Crystal" — a Mexican soap opera
— instead of the nightly half hour of political broad-
casts by the parties on Israeli TV.
The main reason for this apathy is a sense of futil-
ity; most voters expect that, no matter what they do,
this election will end, as the last two have, in stale-
mate.
This assumption, which has been the common wis-
dom of political pros for several months, was recently
buttressed by the polls. On the eve of the Shavuot hol-
iday, four national public opinion surveys published
remarkably similar findings. They all showed Labor
and its left wing allies getting around 55 seats in the
120 member Knes,set, and the Likud and its tight-wing
satellites winning between 50 and 52. If these polls
are correct, the balance of power (61 seats is a ma-
jority) could be held by the ultra-Orthodox factions,
which are expected to garner 10 seats. Another strong
possibility is a post-election partnership between the
big two, Labor and Likud.
So the most likely scenarios call for either another
Likud-led coalition, heavily influenced by the Ortho-
dox parties, or a national unity government with
Yitzhak Rabin as prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir as
defense minister and otherwise quite similar to the
current government.
22
FRIDAY, JUNE 19, 1992
No wonder the public is less than interested. To date
the campaign has had no excitement, no humor, and
virtually no major differences between Likud and
Labor.
Both favor holding on to the Golan Heights and
have had little to say about the economy. The only real
difference has been Mr. Shamir's insistence on keep-
ing all of the settlements in the territories and Mr. Ra-
bin's willingness to relinquish "political" (as opposed
to "security") settlements.
Both major parties have staged lackluster cam-
paigns that offer little promise of breaking the expected
tie. Labor, headed by former prime minister Yitzhak
Rabin, has based its strategy on Mr. Rabin's com-
parative popularity; the party even changed its name
to "Labor Under Rabin" in order to emphasize the
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