Kadima leader Tzipi Livni warned the party caucus Sunday, “The trust of the public towards politics is disappearing, and we are on the way to anarchy because of the way politics is being run.”
She repeated her stand that Kadima's principle of pushing for a new Palestinian Authority state is more important than becoming part of a Netanyahu-led government that does not share the same commitment.
“It is not easy” to leave office after having worked “for what we believe,” she told 27 other Knesset Members, reminding them that Kadima actually won the election because it won one more seat than the Likud.
She also took a swipe at the Shas Sephardic religious party, which was the stumbling block that cost her succeeding Ehud Olmert as prime minister last September. After winning the vote to lead the Kadima party, she failed to form a government because she refused to agree to Shas budgetary demands as the cost of its joining a coalition government.
“Kadima believes in giving to those who are in need but not to the extent and in the way that Shas gives,” she declared.
MK Livni also did not spare Labor party chairman Ehud Barak from criticism for his joining the Likud-led coalition several weeks after saying that the voters in the Knesset election decided to send Labor to the Opposition.
Kadima chose to be in the Opposition “but not as punishment,” according to the Kadima chairwoman. “We are going to the Opposition on our own will to be a principled and better alternative. We remain the same Kadima that went into the elections and which the public wants and will want as its leaders.”