Oops... say opponents, postponing race ‘not that innocent’

The Labor Party has decided to postpone its July 3 leadership contest, citing a concert at Tel Aviv’s Yarkon Park by American pop singer Britney Spears.

Labor chairman Isaac Herzog’s spokesman said the concert would cause traffic jams and make it too hard for party members to reach polling stations, so the party’s election committee decided to delay the race to the following day. He also said the party was having trouble getting security guards for the polling stations, because too many of them were planning to go to the show.

Spears is known for her 2000 hit song “Oops!... I Did It Again,” in which the then-18-year-old sang that she was “not that innocent.”

Herzog’s opponents in Labor noted that it was the third time he had decided to delay the race, and claimed that there were reasons for the decision that were not innocent at all. They noted that polling stations were set to open at 11 a.m., several hours before the concert, and that a polling station at the Tel Aviv Fairgrounds near the concert site could have been moved to any of a dozen locations around the city.

As many as 10 candidates intend to seek the chairmanship of Labor. Former IDF chiefs Gabi Ashkenazi and Benny Gantz, who might have been able to win more support for the party than any of the current candidates, both said at an event of their new socioeconomic/society-oriented organization Pnima that they currently have no plans to enter politics.

Spears, 35, is multi-platinum, Grammy Award-winning artist with nearly 150 million records sold worldwide. She was born in Mississippi and raised in Louisiana and became an international sensation with the albums Baby One More Time (1999) and Oops!... I Did It Again (2000).

It will be her first visit to Israel. The visit is part of Spears’s summer tour throughout Asia, which is taking place as part of effort to promote her new album Glory.