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Time - Man of the Year
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Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso
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1992-09-22
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THE WEEK, Page 26WORLD"The Longest Yawn"
The big showdown campaign in Israel turns out to be a snooze
It had been billed as the Grand Battle of the Yitzhaks: a
robust election campaign pitting Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak
Shamir against the toughest foe he has faced -- the former and
newly returned head of the Labor Party, Yitzhak Rabin. Instead,
the fight has shriveled into what the Jerusalem Post last week
called "the Longest Yawn." Voters are so overcome with ennui
that the major parties are canceling campaign events for lack
of attendance. Posters and banners can hardly be seen in the
streets. And Shamir's Likud is moaning that the Venezuelan soap
opera Crystal is drawing the party's natural constituency away
from the nightly dose of televised party propaganda.
The principal source of the rampant indifference is that
nobody expects the June 23 voting to really change anything. For
some time, the opposition Labor Party has been running well
ahead of Shamir's Likud in the polls; the latest surveys give
the parties, respectively, 42 and 33 places in the 120-seat
Knesset. But because neither organization has anything close to
a majority, some kind of coalition is inevitable, as has always
been the case in Israeli elections. And when the big two parties
are grouped with their natural alignment partners, they are
running neck and neck.
The result may be another national-unity government, with
Labor and the Likud sharing power, as they have already done
twice in the past, after tight elections in 1984 and 1988. With
Labor likely to be the larger grouping, Rabin may replace Shamir
as Prime Minister. But the two men's policies are so similar
that such a prospect elicits little excitement. No wonder many
voters are more interested in knowing whether Victoria, the
Caracas fashion mogul, will discover that her new model,
Crystal, is actually the daughter she conceived with a
priest-in-training and gave up for adoption long ago.