Tarnishing trends from municipal mayhem

There are three trends that may emerge from Tuesday’s municipal elections – and all three of them may prove unfounded in the long run.

The first is that the race served as a bellwether for the support of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, just like next Tuesday’s midterm elections in the United States will for US President Donald Trump.

By that logic, Jerusalem Affairs Minister Ze’ev Elkin’s disappointing third-place finish after putting the prime minister on his campaign posters would indicate that Netanyahu is doomed in the 2019 general election.

But Elkin lost in spite of Netanyahu, not because of him. He lost because he ran a poor campaign, started too late, failed to prevent Deputy Mayor Yossi Daitch from running, and because Jerusalemites don’t like it when candidates move to the city to run.

The second alleged trend is that women are now taking over municipal politics and that this is “the year of the woman” in politics.

One could receive that impression from the high-profile victories of Einat Kalisch Rotem in Haifa, Aliza Bloch in Beit Shemesh and another nine female mayors. There are another six women who made run-off races, four of whom have a good chance of winning.

But if there ends up being 15 female mayors out of 257 local authorities, is that really supposed to impress anyone? When it comes to municipal government, women clearly still have a long way to go.

The final trend is that the haredim (ultra-Orthodox) have changed, because they backed female candidates for mayor – and that they have become so divided, their political power could plummet in the next Knesset elections.

Indeed, Kalisch Rotem received a big boost from Degel Hatorah and Bloch could not have won her race if all of the haredim had united behind incumbent mayor Moshe Abutbul.

But Kalisch Rotem was merely an instrument of haredi revenge against her predecessor Yonah Yahav, who they saw as anti-religious, and Bloch received no public endorsements from major haredi leaders. Any backing she got from them in her race against a sitting haredi mayor was kept hushed, and there was the revenge factor in such support.

As Channel 2 religious affairs correspondent Yair Cherki tweeted, the true test of how haredim see women is how many haredi women ran for mayor or city council across the country – and the answer is only one: Petah Tikva city council candidate Racheli Morgenstern, who lost.

That leaves the trend of haredi voting to become more divided.

United Torah Judaism ran divided in Jerusalem and in other cities across the country. UTJ’s parties Degel Hatorah and Agudat Yisrael sued each other in Elad. Degel seems to have more in common now with the Sephardi Shas Party than with their

longtime Ashkenazi political partner.

But can this trend keep up? It will soon be clear, from two upcoming indicators.

The first is the run-off in Jerusalem. Daitch told the haredi radio station Kol Chai on Thursday that he wants his rabbis to endorse city councilman Moshe Lion. If all the haredim unite against councilman Ofer Berkovitch, it could be a step toward their reunification, having learned a lesson from their municipal splintering.

But perhaps the haredi infighting can allow Berkovitch to win.

The second is Netanyahu’s behavior in the weeks ahead. If he pushes forward by lowering the electoral threshold to enable Degel Hatorah and Agudat Yisrael to run apart, the rift is serious. That could mean haredi influence in the next government could fall and religious pluralism could be advanced.

However, the more likely scenario is that the electoral threshold will remain the same and haredi power will continue to grow along with the size of its families.

So these trends will be tested. And time will tell how many of them turn out to be tarnished. •