OlehGirl.com
Bibi, Obama, same poll results, different reasons
Public opinion has turned against both Obama and Bibi Netanyahu after their first year in office. Obama’s ratings have fallen in the U.S. in the last year more dramatically than for any previous President in his first year. A majority of Americans believe Obama is leading the country in the wrong direction. Yet, Obama personally remains very popular, with a majority liking him. So for Obama, it is his policies and not his personality that form the crux of voter dissatisfaction.
After Bibi’s first year, a majority of Israelis now disapprove. Unlike Obama, however, it is Bibi’s personality that voters despise. A majority of the Israeli public is dissatisfied with his performance and questions his suitability as prime minister. Yet, support for his party, the Likud, is skyrocketing. If elections were to be held today, his party would receive 35 Knesset seats –8 seats more than they got in the last election and a startling 23 seats more than in the 2006 election.
Mofaz, meanwhile, is determined to destroy the Kadima party from within in the quest for personal power. Despite the fact the fully 89% of Kadima voters prefer Livni over Mofaz (I find it surprising that there is 11% who can even stomach this idiot), he has been stirring up all kinds of internal warfare –and making it quite visible to the public.
Voters in general, however, are not particularly happy with any of the existing parties. The same poll showed that, if Yair Lapid can successfully start a party to enter into the next elections, fully a quarter of Israelis would vote for it –enough to put him into the Prime Minister’s seat. That is, of course, why there is broad support across all the existing parties for what is being called the “Lapid law” — a law making anyone in the media business, whether it be journalist and other media personality, ineligible to enter politics until they’ve resigned all media positions and been out of the media spotlight for one year. Ironically, or perhaps not, that proposal has served to put the wind in Lapid’s sails, politically speaking.
| Print article | This entry was posted by Yael on February 5, 2010 at 3:38 pm, and is filed under Politics, U.S. Politics. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
(Photo by Dani Machlis)
about 6 months ago
A party to end all parties? One of the problems of Europe and, I think, Israel is that people simply start a new party when they don’t like what the existing ten thousand parties do. In the end every voter will have his or her own party.
The effect is that because of the necessity to gather a majority, parties who only managed to get single-digit percentages of votes suddenly find they have incredible political power. This is a perversion of democracy: minuscule minorities suddenly rule. Israel has its experience with this, just look at Shas etc. So I question the usefulness of the fact that yet another party is about to be founded.
about 6 months ago
I think Kadima’s problem is much more than Mofaz (which has revealed himself to be even more opprtunistic and power-seeking than I imagined). Livni’s childish behaviour is much more the problem here.
In particular, the senseless attacks on the government (the recent Libermann-Syria kerfuffle is a case in mind – it’s clear to any sentient person which he was trying to deter Syria) and gutter language (“תהיה גבר ותתקפל” for example)…
Also, Kadima’s voters supported getting into the government and Livni defied them, so there’s little ground to attack Mofaz for ignoring them too.
As for the Lapid poll, on the one hand it’s pretty normal even in the U.S. for new parties to have favourable polls which shrink to nothingness on election day – I’m sure it’s exaggerated. On the other hand, there’s a pretty steady “none of the above” vote going to marginal parties since Tzomet in 1992, followed by Shinui and the Gimlaim, so alas the poll has some validity… I’d have hoped these people have learned their lesson from the Gimlaim fiasco and turned to a real party with a real agenda…