Off to the races

Israelis head to the polls for local elections Tuesday, but for the Israeli press there are only two races of significance, the mayorships of the country’s most populous cities, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Voters might be hitting the polls around the country, but all eyes (and front pages) are on the duel between Jerusalem’s incumbent Mayor Nir Barkat and challenger Moshe Lion.

Israel Hayom leads off with a quote from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reminding Israeli voters that “the municipal elections are important.”

“You determine who will continue the momentum, the progress and the development. We do this on a national level and need to continue this on a local level,” the prime minister is quoted saying.

The paper reports that the focus of the municipal elections is, of course, Jerusalem, “in which an elections campaign is concluding with heated and continuous smears and accusations by both incumbent Mayor Nir Barkat and Moshe Lion, who lived until recently in Givatayim and is running for mayor with the support of Yisrael Beytenu chair Avigdor Liberman and Shas chairman Aryeh Deri.”

Haaretz reports that while many Israelis are apathetic about the mayoral races, moneyed citizens are investing greater funds in local politics. It lists the notable private donors to mayoral candidates’ war chests in the Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Ramat Gan races. Barkat received the maximum donation of NIS 5,000 ($1,400) from Moshe Edri, one of the owners of the Cinema City theater under construction in the capital, even though Edri doesn’t live in Jerusalem. All told, it reports, Barkat raked in almost NIS 400,000 (about $110,000) in campaign donations. It notes that Lion received most of his campaign financing from Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu party.

Another exceptional case is that of Nahariya’s incumbent mayor — for the past 24 years — Jacky Sabag, who managed to muster up nearly NIS 500,000 in donations, exceeding Haifa incumbent Yonah Yahav’s donations by over NIS 100,000. Most of Sabag’s donations, the paper reports, came from real estate developers active in the northern town.

Yedioth Ahronoth points out that “in Jerusalem… the city is divided into a large ultra-Orthodox bloc and a secular-religious bloc (what the latter means, however, is unclear), and generally the candidate who succeeds in sweeping one bloc and taking a bite out of the other wins.”

It notes that a large segment of the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox population remained largely undecided right up to polling day, but “the two candidates invested great effort in order to enlist the ultra-Orthodox to their side, or at least to convince them not to vote for their opponent.”

Surprisingly, there are no op-eds about the Jerusalem or Tel Aviv elections in Yedioth Ahronoth.

Israel Hayom columnist Dan Margalit writes about the importance of municipal elections, arguing that they impact day-to-day life for Israelis far more than national elections. “Municipalities and regional councils need transparency, daylight, housecleaning,” he says, noting some historic cases of corruption in local government. He urges Israelis not to vote for the handful of political candidates currently embroiled in corruption scandals.

Even the conservative writer says that despite the fact that Lion is “a capable man,” his political affiliation makes him suspect. “Tell me who is running you, and I’ll tell you how far you’ll descend,” Margalit writes.

“With Aryeh Deri and Avigdor Liberman and a certain handful of Likud activists in Jerusalem” backing him, Margalit says, Lion ought to have forgone his chance to run, and preserved his good name.

According to Maariv columnist Shalom Yerushalmi, “Jerusalem is fighting for its life” in Tuesday’s vote. “The results will determine the future, the character, the nature and the general air of the city in the next five years. The elections will determine its priorities. The elections will also determine the ways in which City Hall will be managed and the governing culture in the city,” he writes.

While he acknowledges that Barkat is far from a perfect mayor, and points out his flaws (in education, sanitation, housing, etc.), Yerushalmi calls Lion a “straw man” for Liberman and Deri, who “doesn’t know what [Jerusalem] residents want, and what they do. Not the secular and not the ultra-Orthodox.”

“He didn’t know that secular [Jerusalemites] go to movie theaters that are open on Shabbat. He didn’t know that the ultra-Orthodox built a huge, anti-Zionist yeshiva in downtown,” Yerushalmi writes, and calls the Jerusalem election the fight between “the old and new politics.” Without actually saying it, he urges readers to vote Barkat.

For Liberman, writes Haaretz’s Yossi Verter, Lion’s run for Jerusalem City Hall is a political suicide mission. “[E]ver since Lion threw his hat into the ring, Liberman has known no rest. He has worked day and night to get his pawn elected, devoting more time to courting ultra-Orthodox power brokers than in all the rest of his life put together.” Verter contends that Liberman is running Lion’s campaign “to restore the old politics to their pristine purity — a politics in which you ignore the residents’ desires, values and complaints, and simply tell your subjects how to vote.”