Very sorry, UTD, if this is not exactly related to this thread… Let me know if you think it’s not; i’ll edit it out.
TV humiliation as Sharon fails to stem voter exodus, Chris McGreal
The Guardian, 10 January 2003
An Israeli judge pulled the plug on his prime minister Ariel Sharon mid-way through an angry and rambling television address last night which was meant to deny corruption allegations and win back voters who are fleeing his party in droves. With opinion polls showing a rapid collapse in public trust and his rightwing bloc perilously close to losing its majority in this month’s general election, Mr Sharon was forced to make a public statement about $1.5m given to his family last year by a British businessman.
Before the address, commentators agreed that Mr Sharon is “no longer the Teflon prime minister” and that he needed a masterful performance to regain public trust. But after about 20 minutes of avoiding specifics in favour of vitriolic denunciations of his opponents whom he accused of “despicable slander… with one purpose, to bring down the government of Israel”, he was abruptly taken off the air for violating another law.
Israel’s election commission obtained a court order because Mr Sharon’s speech amounted to “electioneering” which is illegal on television. Mr Sharon failed to explain convincingly the circumstances of the $1.5m (£934,000) loan.
The broadcast may even have fuelled the decline of Likud which has lost about one-third of its backing over the past month, according to the latest polls. In addition, 31% of voters said they no longer believe Mr Sharon is fit to be prime minister.
Supporters of the prime minister’s arch-rival for the Likud leadership, the foreign minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, are already beginning to agitate for his resignation. The fraud squad is investigating whether the loan to one of Mr Sharon’s sons from Cyril Kern, a wealthy former textile manufacturer in Cape Town, was indirectly used to repay illegal campaign funds.
If so, Mr Sharon could face charges of deception, fraud and lying to the police over the source of the funds. There is no suggestion that Mr Kern did anything illegal. Last night the prime minister told the Israeli public he had been “horrified” to learn of the original illegal campaign funds even though the front company used to launder the funds was set up by his then lawyer, Dov Weisglass, who now heads the prime minister’s office.
He said he did not know where the money came from to repay the campaign funds after the state comptroller concluded they were illegal. The fraud squad alleges that the prime minister told the police and state comptroller that the money came from a mortgage on his ranch. But his bank had turned down the mortgage because Mr Sharon does not own the ranch.
To win back the voters, they will have to believe that Mr Sharon knew nothing of the loan to his son. Last night, the prime minister tried to say that recent revelations of vote buying and organised crime infiltration of his Likud party were groundless and the work of his Labour opponent, Amram Mitzna, who was in London to meet Tony Blair. But that is unlikely to satisfy sceptical voters given that the police have already made several arrests and Mr Sharon was forced to fire one of his deputy ministers implicated in the scandal.
The prime minister’s friend and special envoy to the White House, Aryeh Ganger, refused to answer questions from fraud squad detectives last week about his role in funnelling illegal funds to Mr Sharon’s 1999 campaign. To add to the prime minister’s woes, the supreme court yesterday overturned a ban on two leading Arab-Israeli politicians from seeking re-election to the knesset.
Likud is haemorrhaging support not only to its allies on the right but, crucially, to a centrist party, Shinui, that looks likely to triple its seats and emerge as the third largest party in the knesset.
Shinui is led by a populist rabble rouser, Yosef Lapid, who has won support by virulently opposing religious parties and demanding a secular state.
