Agenda-driven leader bows out
TZIPI LIVNI fought back her tears on Monday as she announced her retirement from frontline politics.
Few remember these days that 23 years ago, before anyone in politics knew her name, Tzipi Livni was the young Likud activist seen on television crying on election night 1996, when everyone thought Benjamin Netanyahu had lost. She did not remain anonymous for long.
Her meteoric political career was first defined by her two political patrons. Early on, Mr Netanyahu, who ended up winning that election by a whisker, made her chief executive of the influential Government Companies Authority and in 1999, backed her race for the Likud list. But he lost that election and it was the man who replaced him as Likud leader, Ariel Sharon, who became Ms Livni’s new mentor.
Over the next few years, she was one of a group of Likudniks around Sharon who began to distance themselves from the party’s nationalist ideology and acknowledge the need for a territorial compromise with the Palestinians. This would take shape in 2005 as the disengagement from Gaza and, a few months later, in a break from Likud to form the centrist party Kadima.
Kadima was to be the peak of Ms Livni’s political career. After it won the 2006 election, she served as foreign minister and tried to negotiate a peace agreement with the Palestinians.
But Kadima proved a short-lived experiment in centrism. After Ehud Olmert resigned over allegations of corruption, she became the leader of the party, but failed to keep the coalition together. In the 2009 election, Ms Livni’s Kadima actually won one seat more than Mr Netanyahu’s Likud, but she once again failed to form a coalition. Three years later, she lost the party leadership and then split away to form her new Hatnuah party, which never really took off.
Tzipi Livni’s personal trajectory is the story of the last two decades of Israeli politics. In the first ten years she went from new MK to the threshold of the prime minister’s office. In the next ten, all three of the parties with which she was involved — Kadima, Hatnuah and the nowdissolved
Zionist Union with Labour — met a premature end. Her faction fell below the electoral threshold and none of the other centre-left parties offered her a spot on their list.
She had become electoral kryptonite with her insistence on putting solving the conflict with the Palestinians at the top of her agenda.
In her farewell statement, Ms Livni said that “peace has become a dirty word, democracy is under attack and a different political position from the government has become a curse.” But the opposition today prefers to fight the government without her.
The Palestinian issue has become a vote-loser, even on the centre-left, and everyone is waiting for Mr Netanyahu to be brought down by the corruption investigations against him rather than in a straight election fight. At the moment, Israeli politics has no space for an agendadriven leader like her.