Populist Plugs Away in Kadima’s Shadow

The park was scruffy, the microphone balky and the crowd short of colossal. But Amir Peretz was soldiering on with his insistent call for people power.

“You have the chance!” the Labor Party leader shouted at the election rally in a bleak corner of this desert town, thrusting his index finger at the night air. “The chance is in your hand! The power of that paper can change your life!”

With elections just days away and his left-leaning party running a distant second in the polls, Peretz’s bid to lead Israel may appear quixotic. But the 54-year-old’s populist appeal seemed to resonate with the working-class crowd -- many of its members single parents and laborers living in a weather-beaten housing complex next door. At several points, they let loose with noisy applause.

“He is the representative of the workers. He is our ambassador,” said Samson Bunker, 51, a youth counselor from the neighborhood who joined about 150 others at the rally.

Peretz, a Moroccan immigrant best known for leading the country’s largest labor federation, shocked Israel last fall when he defeated the 82-year-old Shimon Peres to take over as leader of the sagging Labor Party.

Peretz’s relative youth, grass-roots following and background as a Sephardic, or eastern, Jew atop a party long dominated by Ashkenazi Jews from Europe prompted followers to predict he would make the campaign a forum on Israel’s inequities and transform Labor into a winner again.

Peretz has insistently hammered at bread-and-butter issues during the campaign, proposing a one-third increase in the minimum wage, to the equivalent of $1,000 a month, and vowing a universal pension and child-care subsidies to help working parents.

Analysts give Peretz credit for assembling a party slate with respected figures, including Avishay Braverman, an economist and president of Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, and Ami Ayalon, a former head of the Shin Bet domestic security agency.

But tactical missteps, lingering skepticism among many voters and the resurgence of the security issue that traditionally dominates Israeli elections appear to have relegated Labor to a duel for second place with the conservative Likud Party. Polls show both parties running far behind the centrist Kadima movement founded by Ariel Sharon and led now by acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

“He was the great hope,” said Reuven Hazan, a political science professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “Peretz’s background and the economic situation in Israel should have been able to work together. But he hasn’t been able to pull it off.”

Many Israelis remain hesitant to make Peretz prime minister because of concerns that he is ill-prepared, especially in matters of security and diplomacy.

“Let’s be perfectly blunt about it -- he’s completely inexperienced,” Hazan said.

Few expect Labor to win in Tuesday’s elections. Commentators say party strategists hope for a sufficiently strong showing to position the party as a possible coalition partner in a government led by Kadima.

Such an alliance would give Peretz the chance for a senior ministerial post -- his first -- which could serve as a springboard for a future campaign. But if the party is humiliated at the polls, he could be tossed out of the leadership, ending his recent, exhilarating journey.

Peretz, who grew up in Sderot, a working-class town with a large immigrant population next to the Gaza Strip, presents a distinctly down-to-earth image. He is seldom seen in a necktie. He speaks English poorly, unlike his two main rivals, Olmert and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and has been mercilessly spoofed for that. Detractors in Israel’s Russian-language media, meanwhile, have compared his thick mustache to Josef Stalin’s.

Some commentators blame Peretz for not trying harder to keep Peres from defecting to Kadima -- a move that strengthened the new party’s appeal among left-tilting voters and accelerated the exit of other Labor members, especially older Ashkenazi Jews.

Peretz’s rise has stirred long-standing anxieties in Israel over ethnic bias against Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, though he has tried to play down the issue. No Sephardic Jew has been Israeli prime minister or even the top candidate of a leading party, although many have held important government posts, including current Cabinet ministers and the nation’s president, Moshe Katsav.

“The ethnic demon is the No. 1 enemy of the social struggle,” Peretz told the daily newspaper Haaretz this month. “It is the barrier between the new-immigrant worker from Russia and the veteran immigrant from Tunisia or Algeria. But I am not ignoring this.”

Peretz’s family moved from Morocco to Sderot in 1956, when he was 4. His father became a factory worker, and the younger Peretz has said that although his family had to skimp, it never went hungry.

At 30, he was elected mayor of Sderot, and won a seat in parliament in 1988. Peretz fast sought to make a name in the Labor Party by joining a group of young lawmakers who saw themselves as its future leaders.

In 1995, Peretz was elected chairman of the powerful Histadrut labor federation and held the post until after his triumph in the Labor primary. Supporters say Peretz was an energetic advocate for equality for Israel’s have-nots, while critics say he used the union post mainly as a political steppingstone.

His campaign has heavily favored issues of worker rights and social justice, including calls to restore welfare benefits that were cut while Netanyahu was finance minister. In his speech in Beersheba, Peretz spent few words on security, except to promise a tough stance against terrorism.

He said unemployment and poverty represented a more severe blow to the dignity of Israelis than rockets attacks by Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip.

“If we want Israel to be strong, the people must be strong,” said Peretz, who is married with four children.

Party officials and analysts say Peretz appears to have made up for the loss of traditional Labor supporters by attracting voters from working-class communities that have been Likud bastions.

Among those is Beersheba, which serves as commercial hub for the Negev desert and anchors a voting region that solidly backed Likud in the three previous elections. A strong Labor showing in these areas could signal an end to past voting patterns and redraw Israel’s political map.

Peretz, who calls himself “the new Israeli,” insists he is not daunted by the odds. “Every stage I went through was a serious obstacle,” he told Haaretz.

“And when you face obstacles like that, you have two options: You can sink into the mire of bitterness or ... transform the difficulty into an empowering and tempering instrument that adds to your strength. I always chose the second option.”