After weeks of polling showing that he would trounce his opponent and secure a second term as mayor of Jerusalem, high-tech entrepreneur Nir Barkat on Tuesday did indeed handily defeat Moshe Lion, a former director of the Prime Minister’s bureau. Barkat won by 6 points and garnered an absolute majority, getting 51 percent of the vote.
Much of the political drama surrounding the election involved Israeli political personalities and power politics. Lion had been backed by Aryeh Deri of the Shas party and Avigdor Lieberman of the Yisrael Beiteinu party, both of whom are in the process of either consolidating or seeking to regain influence. More broadly, however, it was read as an election that pitted Barkat’s more secular backers against Lion’s more religious voters:
Barkat’s political base is built upon the middle-class, center-right Jerusalem Jews who are less strict in their religious practices than the ultra-Orthodox residents, who now make up about one-third of the city. Barkat’s demographic had been shrinking in recent years, a phenomenon he struggled to reverse by improving public schools, building parks and encouraging entertainment and restaurants that would be open on the Jewish Sabbath.
A recent study suggested that that Barkat’s deliberate efforts to maintain a robust secular presence in Jerusalem were succeeding, and that there had been “a significant fall in rates of secular and national-religious young people leaving the city.”
Nonetheless, pundits and activists at times found it challenging to understand the broad, consistent dynamics of the race. Ori Nir, the spokesman for Americans for Peace Now, conveyed reports during the election that Lion was in fact winning:
Jerusalem municipal elections: Pundits: high ultra-Orth’ turnout and low secular turnout likely to make extremist Moshe Lion the next mayor.
— Ori Nir (@OriNir_APN) October 22, 2013
This is the second Israeli election in a row during which observers brushed off robust polling data to confidently predict results that turned out to be the exact opposite of true. Western pundits widely and somewhat infamously predicted that the last round of Israeli parliamentary elections would see the country take a ‘lurch to the right,’ in the face of months of polling indicating that the Israeli electorate was depolarizing and moving toward the center.
The subsequent election was in line with polling predictions of a secular surge and a rush to the center. The new Israeli cabinet was eventually without an ultra-orthodox presence.
The parties that took control of the key economic ministries – the Economy and Trade portfolio and the Finance portfolio – were stacked with committed free market advocates. The first meeting of the new cabinet saw Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asking for quick policy turnarounds [Hebrew] and focusing on budgetary issues.
Diplomatically, both the resulting Israeli coalition and its opposition explicitly endorse the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and the goal of creating a viable Palestinian state. As coalition negotiations wound down, in fact, incoming minister Yael German took to Israeli radio to say that there was a green light for immediate peace talks with Palestinian Authority figures, with an eye on reaching a peace deal. At least six ministers were given some sort of responsibility for foreign affairs.
