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Labor Party's Victory
Aided By Sovie t Immigrants

INA FRIEDMAN

Israel Correspondent

srael is waiting for Rabin"
went the refrain of the Labor
Party jingle that has echoed
throughout the past month of
--._ electioneering. That is precisely
what it got.
Even with the army vote still
to be counted (leaving the possi-
=bility that a seat may move from
one list to another), it's clear that
the Labor Party, more than the
, Left as a bloc, has won a stun-
ning victory.
, Much of the credit goes to
Yitzhak Rabin, 70, for pursuing
> ,a strategy that enabled Israeli
voters — generally a conserva-
tive lot — to cross lines not just
_ from one party to another but
1, ---) from the Right to the Left.
They didn't do so in great
" numbers; then again they didn't
have to. And Mr. Rabin made it
relatively painless for them by
I blurring the differences between
Labor's policy and that of the
.
-, Likud;
by emphasizing person-

Clearly the public's
mood was to throw
the rascals out.
The Likud took a
drubbing by losing
eight seats.

ality over ideology; by training

his sights obstinately on disaf-

fected Likud voters; and by ham-
mering away at the key message
that Israel was going to change
its government simply because
the time had come to do so.
• For Labor it was a novel ap-
proach that left some veterans
grumbling. But it worked.
"Did the Left win or did the
Right lose?" was one of the first
questions asked after the state-
television forecast the upset (on
- the basis of exit polls) just min-
utes after the balloting ended.
The answer is: a little of both.
Clearly the public's mood was
to throw the rascals out. The
Likud took a drubbing by losing
eight seats (dropping from 40 to
32 in the 120-seat Knesset). La-
bor made a gain of six seats (to
45 seats), but not all came from
the Likud or other voters who
- crossed the lines. On the con-
trary, a good proportion of the
some 175,000 voters who de-
• serted the Likud gave their votes
to the right-wing Tzomet Party,
whose representation rose from
two seats to seven.
Others registered their anger
(as in the past) by voting for the
Orthodox, Sephardi-oriented
Shas Party, which gained two

seats despite a spate of corrup-
tion scandals and a pledge to bol-
ster the Likud in any future
coalition (which will probably be
conveniently forgotten now).
Still, what happened on Tues-
day was definitely a shift toward
the center in Israel, not just a re-
alignment of the votes on the
Right. One radical right-wing
party (Moledet), whose platform
calls for the "voluntary transfer"
of the Palestinians out of the ter-
ritories, failed to increase its rep-
resentation beyond two seats.
The aggressive three-seat
Tehiyah Party, which was iden-
tified with the hard core of ideo-
logical settlers in the territories,
got wiped off the map. Even the
five seats picked up by Tzomet
represented a move toward the
center, since its platform placed
the emphasis on improving ed-
ucation, changing the electoral
system, fighting corruption, and
making the Orthodox parties
pull their weight, rather than op-
position to the peace process or
the granting of autonomy to the
Palestinians.
Yet the clearest indication of
the shift is to be found in simple
arithmetic: the Right lost six
seats while the Left gained sev-
en — one at the expense of the
religious parties, which have tra-
ditionally been the deciding force
in Israeli coalition-making.
Perhaps the most dramatic as-
pect of Tuesday's upset is that
while Yitzhak Shamir's govern-
ment was dependent on the 18
seats of the country's four reli-
gious parties to constitute a ma-
jority, Mr. Rabin doesn't need
any of those parties to form a
government today. He could
build a coalition within the Left
alone.
If many of votes lost by the
Likud remained on the Right or
went to the religious bloc, why
did the Left came out so far
ahead? Because of the proverbial
wild card in this election: the
300,000 new immigrants, most-
ly from the former Soviet Union,
who joined what had begun to
look like a fairly rigid Israeli elec-
torate.
No one knows yet just how
many of these newcomers man-
ifested their right to vote, and it
will take weeks before experts
can analyze the vote to verify
their effect on its outcome. But
Israel Television helped reveal
the general drift of the immi-
grant vote by asking newcomers
to vote in specially colored en-
velopes in its exit poll.
The results of this sample
were that close to 60 percent of
the immigrants voted for the
Left (47 percent for Labor alone);
18 percent voted for the Likud;
and 5.5 percent voted for the

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