Kadima chairwoman Tzipi Livni is facing growing unrest within her party, as challenges to the legitimacy of her leadership multiply. The latest attempt to discredit Livni's claim to leadership came from Amir Segal, who is editor-in-chief of the party supporters' website, “Yalla Kadima.”
In an opinion piece published on the website, Segal determined that “the leadership of the chairman of Kadima has never been challenged as it is being challenged now. Certainly with Sharon, but also with Olmert, there was not a feeling of a failure of leadership and there was not a growing clamor of voices that challenged them or questioned their legitimacy.”
“The de-legitimization Livni is suffering from is not just her private problem,” Segal wrote. “It radiates onto the entire party. More and more Knesset Members and central activists feel comfortable challenging, criticizing or showing contempt for their chairwoman. There are some who are careful not to disrespect Livni and who express their criticism carefully and respectfully, but others attack her in an unbridled fashion.”
Livni's camp, on the other hand, has conducted “a campaign of de-legitimization” against her detractors, added Segal. The only thing preventing an all-out confrontation in Kadima, in his opinion, is the perception of Livni as being popular in the general Israeli public. However, he said, this popularity too may be waning.
Recent polls have shown that if elections were held today, Kadima would lose at least four of its current 28 Knesset seats.
Segal's criticism joins numerous other articles in a similar vein that were recently published on Yalla Kadima, and sometimes-veiled statements by Knesset Members and senior party officials against her leadership.
According to Arutz Sheva's Hebrew service, the party primaries in which Livni defeated MK Shaul Mofaz in the run-up to the 2009 general elections were considered by many Kadima members to have been fraudulent. Some even described it as “the most serious act of democratic fraud in the state's history.”
Critics of Livni's razor-thin victory over Mofaz said that it was accompanied by rigged polls which created a false impression that she was far ahead of Mofaz, and which the media cooperated with in an unprofessional and seemingly coordinated fashion. In addition, her victory was made possible by a Kadima court decision to allow polling to go on beyond the hour at which the polls were scheduled to close.