tel aviv | Shimon Peres joins a young couple having lunch at a seaside restaurant and asks them who they are voting for in Israel’s upcoming election. They smile nervously, glance up at the swarm of photographers and TV cameras that surround the former prime minister and admit the truth: They don’t know.
“No one has convinced us what the right path is and we ourselves don’t even know, making it harder,” said Nurit Novak, 26, as Peres, clad in a leather bomber jacket and campaigning for the Kadima Party, moves on to the next table. There are many voters left to woo.
Yarin Yeger, a 20-year-old soldier, strolling along a nearby boardwalk, says she too feels adrift politically.
“I don’t see any of the candidates as potentially good prime ministers,” she said.
Campaigners in the Tuesday, March 28 election are battling voter apathy and indecision, concepts once alien to a country that for decades had voter turnout of around 80 percent and in which most people had a political camp to which they were committed.
Polls describe about 20 percent of the population as “floating voters” — still undecided this close to the election date.
Many voters feel that none of the candidates have the stature or pull of Israel’s prime minister, Ariel Sharon, who has been in a coma since a Jan. 4 stroke.
“There is great confusion because Sharon is no longer at the helm, and people have lost their balance,” said Nitza Hameiri, 56, a real-estate appraiser.
There is little sense of election excitement despite dramatic changes — a prime minister who lies comatose, leaving behind his new party; a Sephardic Jew leading the Labor Party for the first time; and Hamas’ recent victory in Palestinian elections.
Voter turnout is expected to be lower than in past elections. It was already lower in 2003, with slightly less than 69 percent of registered voters casting ballots.
The assumption that Kadima will trounce its rivals contributes to a sense of ennui, observers say. In the most recent polls, Kadima is predicted to win between 37 and 39 seats in Israel’s 120-seat Knesset. Many of those seeking change are finding it in Kadima, breaking down the Israeli electorate from its former pattern of left vs. right.
Voter apathy is even more apparent in Israel’s younger generation. A poll by One Voice, a grass-roots movement that encourages dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, found that 44 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 32 plan to vote in the upcoming elections.
Analyst Yossi Klein Halevi welcomes the establishment of Kadima, he said, and the low-key, yet “historic” election he said it seems to have prompted.
“People who complain that this is a boring election are frustrated leftists and rightists. This is our first election in which the center is not only a vague longing on the part of many Israelis but an actual option,” said Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center, a think tank in Jerusalem.
“This election has changed the political map for the first time in decades. We are no longer a society defined by a right and left schism, but a political system with a strong center.”