Livni hopes for vindication, but Mofaz victory Tuesday could end her political career
The woman who almost became prime minister, twice, faces neck-and-neck battle to retain opposition leadership
Raphael Ahren is a former diplomatic correspondent at The Times of Israel.
Tuesday’s Kadima primaries could vindicate Tzipi Livni, and her insistently high-minded approach to Israeli politics. Or they could spell the end of the political career of the woman who four years ago chose not to do the coalition deals that would have made her prime minister, and who narrowly missed out on the top spot again the following year.
It is exceedingly difficult to predict the outcome of party primaries, and Tzipi Livni and her challenger Shaul Mofaz for chair of the centrist Kadima appeared to be neck and neck going into the vote. While some polls were forecasting a victory for the incumbent, many pundits and Knesset insiders believe that Mofaz will prevail and take over the Kadima leadership.
The two politicians ran against each other once before, in the party’s 2008 primaries. Livni received exactly 431 votes more than Mofaz, or about 1.5 percent. Meir Sheetrit and Avi Dichter also ran in those primaries, garnering together about 6,000 votes, or 15 percent. This time around, however, Sheetrit and Dichter have dropped out of the race — and endorsed Mofaz.
“Dichter was a swing vote who could have gotten 10 percent. Now that he threw all his weight behind Mofaz, it’s a done deal for him,” one Knesset insider said.
Kadima’s 28 MKs are more or less evenly split between the two candidates, and it is possible that the party will get its fourth leader since Ariel Sharon founded it in 2005. Israel Hasson, Zeev Bielski, Ronit Tirosh, Otniel Schneller, Nachman Shai and others are supporting the 63-year-old Mofaz. The fact that Shai Hermesh — who for decades was affiliated with the Labor Party — has now defected from Livni’s camp and endorsed Mofaz seems to suggest that even some politicians who might be ideologically closer to her than to her rival seem to sense that Livni has little chance.
Livni, 53, is endorsed by MKs Yoel Hasson, Robert Tiviaev, Majallie Whbee, Marina Solodkin and others — as well as by former lawmakers and those who want to be elected in the future, such as Haim Ramon, Tzachi Hanegbi and Omri Sharon. But Kadima lawmakers who support her have privately stated they will not leave the party if Mofaz wins. Even Livni’s supporters aren’t sure she can win.
‘She could quit politics, and wait on the sidelines until they call her back, or form a new party. But I don’t think she has the inner strength to do that’
Kadima is already split internally, and it is not unlikely that whoever loses Tuesday’s race will officially break away and create a new faction. Some believe that if Livni loses, she will drop out of the political arena altogether.
“If she doesn’t win, she’s going home. She’s not going to stay on as Mofaz’s number two,” said Professor Shmuel Sandler, a specialist on electoral politics from Bar-Ilan University. “It was difficult for Livni to be [former Kadima chair Ehud] Olmert’s number two, and then she didn’t want to be Netanyahu’s number two.”
“She could quit politics, and wait on the sidelines until they call her back, or she could form a new party. But I don’t think she has the inner strength to do that,” Sandler added.
A promising future awaited Livni — until 2009
Just a few years ago, Livni was enjoying a glorious career and seemed poised for still greater success. She served as immigration and absorption and later agriculture minister under Sharon. In 2006 she became Olmert’s foreign minister — presiding over intense negotiations with the Palestinians — and stayed in the position until the general elections in 2009. In the meantime she had taken over the leadership of Kadima from Olmert, but failed to build a stable government after his 2008 resignation over corruption charges.
Kadima’s coalition partners had tried to use the shakeup in the party to achieve new concessions. “If Livni wants a government, she needs to comply with our demands,” Shas chairman Eli Yishai announced, shamelessly, at the time.
But Livni wouldn’t give in, preferring new elections over paying what she considered too heavy a price for the premiership. “When it became clear that everyone and every party was exploiting the opportunity to make demands that were economically and diplomatically illegitimate, I decided to call off [talks] and go to elections,” she said. But her hope that the public would reward her for such integrity, and leave her better able to build a coalition after the elections, went unrealized.
Kadima remained the strongest party after the vote in 2009, with its 28 seats, but the margin between it and the second-place party, the revived Likud, had narrowed immensely, and the Likud had a wider choice of natural coalition partners, putting it in the driving seat as coalition talks began.
With only one seat fewer than in 2006, but just one more than Likud, Kadima could still have had a central role in the government, if it agreed to share power with Benjamin Netanyahu’s 27-seat center-right party. But Livni disagreed. A national union government would be “a coalition that doesn’t allow me to pursue my path, the path of Kadima as we promised the voters,” she said. “A large government has no value if it does not have a path.”
Livni entered the opposition and let Netanyahu form a government without Kadima, a principled step for which some outside observers praised her, although others argued that she and Netanyahu had deprived Israel of a more consensual unity government that could have marginalized special interest parties and formulated compromise policies on matters of land and religion. In her party, many never forgave her for, again, passing up the chance to govern.
“Since then she has not missed a single opportunity to make a mistake: She did not function as an opposition leader, she did not offer an alternative to the government’s policies and she did not lead her party wisely and set clear policy,” Haaretz wrote this week.
‘It’s not enough to be a statesman, you have to be a good politician as well. You have to know how the political system works’
Indeed, Livni is seen as one of the weakest opposition leaders in Israel’s history. One has hardly felt her presence, critics have charged again and again. Some ill-advised statements — for example when she said after the release of Gilad Shalit that she opposed the deal — didn’t exactly boost her popularity, either.
In a recent interview with Haaretz, Livni was asked to evaluate herself. “I was too statesmanlike,” she answered. “In hindsight, it was a mistake. This surfeit of statesmanlike behavior exacted a price that damaged the perception of my leadership, both internally and externally.”
That perceived lack of leadership might very well come back to haunt her in Tuesday’s primaries, as many Kadima members want a leader who is not just a good statesman but can play the game of politics well enough to win the next national elections.
“It’s not enough to be a statesman, you have to be a good politician as well,” said Professor Sandler. “You have to know how the political system works. Livni came in as an outsider and just didn’t know what compromises she needed to make — and what coalitions she needed to make — to survive politically.”
The Times of Israel Community.