TEL AVIV — The Center Party’s four founders are making it clear they are determined to fight to the end, with Yitzhak Mordechai as their candidate for prime minister.
The centrist’s leaders called a news conference Sunday to vehemently defend their candidate despite poor showings in the polls and a call by Labor leader Ehud Barak for Mordechai to drop out of the May 17 race and support him.
“I am running for prime minister, and we will meet on the 18th of this month and see who calls who based on the election results,” Mordechai said, referring to rumors that his party is negotiating to join Barak.
At the news conference, Mordechai’s running mates, Amnon Lipkin Shahak, Dan Meridor and Roni Milo, gave him their full backing.
“For the next two weeks we will do everything we can to convince the public that there is an alternativeand that there is room in politics for us,” Shahak said.
Political observers here had been predicting last week that the centrists were about to merge into One Israel — the Labor Party’s new coalition — and effectively turn the expected two-round election into a one-round make-or-break drama between Barak and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
On Sunday, Barak again called on Mordechai to join him, focusing on “the strength in unity.” Speaking to student leaders in Tel Aviv, Barak argued that “a party born out of the polls should pay attention to them now and do the right thing.”
The polls have been unkind to the Center Party, showing a steady decline from the early days when Mordechai, in the words of the party’s election slogan, seemed “the only man able to win big against Bibi.”
The party’s entire strategy has centered around the fear that Labor, however it dresses itself up with slick new names such as One Israel, is incapable of beating Netanyahu and Likud. This, after all, has been the pattern of Israeli elections — barring Yitzhak Rabin’s victory in 1992 — for the past two decades.
After Mordechai was fired by Netanyahu in January and overnight became the leader of the centrists, the polls were upbeat: If he could send Barak into third place in the first round, Mordechai would beat Netanyahu in the runoff.
Since then, however, Barak has gained ground, making it increasingly unlikely that the Center Party leader can make it into the runoff.
Crowning the centrists’ frustrations, Mordechai’s status as the anti-Netanyahu candidate in the second round has evaporated, too. Polls consistently show that Barak would fare better than Mordechai in a two-way fight against Netanyahu.
As of last weekend, polls were showing Barak would beat Netanyahu by 50 percent to 42 percent in a runoff — the best the Labor leader has achieved so far.
If the trend continues, some insiders say, Mordechai may yet be prevailed upon by his three colleagues — Shahak, Meridor and Milo — to quit the race for premier before the first round and pool his party with One Israel in a coalition against the Likud.
Others, however, take Mordechai at his word.
The former defense minister insists it would be unthinkable and politically inadvisable to “abandon” his supporters at this stage. Mordechai asserts he will fight through the first round and, even if he loses, his followers will remain loyal to his party as coalition negotiations begin.
It is widely assumed that Mordechai and his colleagues would, in that scenario, urge their supporters to vote for Barak in the second round — or at least not to vote for Netanyahu.
Proving that politics is always a guessing game, though, the election scenario may have shifted a bit this week.
Well-known actress and comedian Tikki Dayan, appearing Saturday night at a pro-Barak gathering of stage artists, mocked Likud voters as “riff-raff” and spoke of them as “the other nation.”
Netanyahu pounced on this gaffe like a puma. Barak “laughed along with everyone else. He found it funny,” Netanyahu said.
Barak, belatedly, demanded an apology from the actress — and she duly told the media she regretted the word “riff-raff.”
But damage was done.
Many recall that Labor lost the 1981 election after a popular entertainer, Dudu Topaz, referred to Likud supporters using a derogatory epithet for uneducated Sephardim. Menachem Begin, the Likud leader, exploited that mistake.
“They haven’t changed,” Netanyahu told a cheering crowd of Likud supporters Sunday night. “They can call themselves One Israel but they’re the same condescending elitists,” he said.
“I’m proud to be part of the rabble.”
What is grist for Netanyahu’s mill is manna for the Center Party, too.
With a Sephardi — Mordechai was born in Iraq — at the helm, the party is well placed to pick up the support of voters who may now turn their backs on Barak.
One centrist pundit said anti-Netanyahu voters may yet bless the day that Mordechai rejected the pressures to quit.
With more disasters like Dayan’s gaffe, Barak’s candidacy could yet founder — and Mordechai could come back into his own as “the only man able to win big against Bibi.”