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January 3, 2003/Tevet 29 5763, Vol. 55, No. 19
Shinui Party is dark horse in elections
LESLIE SUSSER
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
JERUSALEM - While pundits are watching the contest between Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's scandal-rocked Likud and Haifa Mayor Amram Mitzna's shell-shocked Labor, a subplot is developing in Israel's upcoming election.
Shinui, a small and until now little-noticed party, led by an outspoken journalist who has never served in the government, has been quietly making sweeping gains.
Just a month before the Jan. 28 election, polls are predicting as many as 14 seats for Shinui, which has just six members in the current Knesset.
The party is led by Yosef "Tommy" Lapid, 72, a Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor.
If the pollsters are right, Shinui could be the big winner in the January election, emerging as a key player and kingmaker and in the next Israeli government.
A coalition built around Likud, Labor and Shinui could be the first all-secular government in Israel's history, with major implications for questions of religion and state.
It also would have an overwhelming mandate for peace moves with the Palestinians or for intensifying Israel's anti-terrorism campaign.
If Shinui becomes part of the ruling coalition, how it adapts to the responsibilities of government will determine whether it's able to become a stable centrist force or whether - like earlier centrist groupings such as the Democratic Movement for Change, Tsomet and the Center Party - it starts disintegrating as soon as it tastes power.
In the meantime, Shinui is picking up votes everywhere. Shinui, not Labor, has been the main beneficiary of the corruption scandal in the Likud's November primaries: More than 100,000 Likud defectors are thought to have gone to Shinui, boosting its electoral tally by three seats, and there could be more to come.
Even more importantly, Shinui has become the party of the young. It's the "in" thing for young, middle-class, mainly Ashkenazi Israelis to support Shinui, much as they once supported the leftist Meretz.
These young people are skeptical of the left's promises of peace and deterred by the right's bleak vision of the future; they see Labor and Likud as pass‚; and they are tired of feeling exploited by fervently Orthodox Israelis who don't work or serve in the army, but still receive government benefits.
Those feelings mesh with Shinui's main messages: an approach to the Palestinians that takes the middle ground between left and right, and a commitment to ending perceived Orthodox privilege and religious coercion.
Shinui's pledge to curtail the power of the fervently Orthodox also appeals to another huge reservoir of potential political support - Russian immigrants - who say that many immigrants who are not Jewish according to religious law are persecuted by the Orthodox establishment.
The attitude of the Interior Ministry - currently controlled by the fervently Orthodox Shas Party - toward Russian immigrants is absurd, Lapid says.
"Shas people, whose sons don't serve in the army, deciding on whether someone who does" serve deserves full citizenship is the "height of immorality," he says.
It's far from assured that Lapid will be able to introduce his secular agenda - Labor or Likud may fear alienating the religious sector - but if he did, Israel would become a different country. There would be civil marriage and divorce; a new, more inclusive definition of who is a Jew; army service for all, including the fervently Orthodox; public transportation on the Sabbath; separation of religion and state; and better relations with Reform Jews abroad.
Lapid unabashedly presents Shinui as the party of the middle class, the "haves,'' and advocates a strong market economy on the Reaganite and Thatcherite models.
The government should give the people fishing rods, not fish, he says - in other words, not subsidies but the skills to make a living.
Lapid feels his party is well-positioned. He believes Sharon will win the election, and will then have three coalition choices: a narrow coalition with the far right, which he won't want; a coalition with Labor and the religious parties, which Labor won't want; or a coalition based on Likud, Labor and Shinui, who together would have more than 70 seats in the 120-member Knesset, laying a base for a highly stable, secular-leaning government.
That prospect is anathema for the religious parties, especially Shas, which fears being excluded from the next government and losing public funding for its educational system.
Whether Shinui is able to become a permanent fixture in Israeli politics, or whether it turns out to be just another passing fad, remains to be seen. But unless the polls are way off, Lapid almost certainly will get his chance to make a real impact in the next government.
Leslie Susser is the diplomatic correspondent for the Jerusalem Report.
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