Will Israeli voters stay home?

The big story following tomorrow’s Israeli elections probably won’t be about winners and losers, but about how few voters turn up to the polls. It is, by all accounts, a momentous election: a new centrist party, Kadima, with a slipping lead, Ariel Sharon still in a coma, and Hamas at the helm of the Palestinian Authority. But ...

The big story following tomorrow's Israeli elections probably won't be about winners and losers, but about how few voters turn up to the polls. It is, by all accounts, a momentous election: a new centrist party, Kadima, with a slipping lead, Ariel Sharon still in a coma, and Hamas at the helm of the Palestinian Authority.

The big story following tomorrow’s Israeli elections probably won’t be about winners and losers, but about how few voters turn up to the polls. It is, by all accounts, a momentous election: a new centrist party, Kadima, with a slipping lead, Ariel Sharon still in a coma, and Hamas at the helm of the Palestinian Authority.

But it seems election apathy has set in. Though it is nearly certain that Kadima will win the most seats in the Knesset tomorrow, pundits are predicting that the contest will be closer than polls attest because so many voters will decide to stay home. Ehud Olmert, Sharon’s successor as leader of Kadima, and Labor Party chief Amir Peretz have taken to attacking one another on the eve of their likely coalition because so many voters are still undecided. According to the most recent Haaretz poll, Kadima’s high of 45 seats in January (after Sharon’s stroke) has slipped to 36, followed by Labor’s 18 and right-wing Likud, led by former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at 14. But a whopping 28 seats worth of voters are still up for grabs.

What’s behind the election malaise? According to the Jerusalem Post, it’s the cacophany of pre-election polls, collective depression from Hamas’s win, and a deep feeling of alienation from scandal-prone politicians. It may also have something to do with Olmert’s Sharon-like unilateralism: He’s vowed to pull out of many West Bank settlements, and demanded that any party joining Kadima’s coalition support his plan. It could be that voters are feeling more and more disconnect between what they support and what’s done in their name (a third of Israelis want the possibility of peace talks with Hamas, though no party supports such moves). For all the political earthquakes in Israel over the past few months, I can’t get past the feeling that there isn’t much freshness to the way in which Kadima will take things forward.

Carolyn O'Hara is a senior editor at Foreign Policy.

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