— Political parties of vastly differing ideologies are selecting their lists this week for the June 30 Knesset elections in which a welter of splinter factions will be battling for seats against the major antagonists, Labor and Likud.
The Rafi faction, a breakaway from Likud headed by former Finance Minister Yigal Hurwitz, voted last night to join former Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan’s new centrist party, Telem. Hurwitz and Zalman Shoval have been guaranteed safe seats. A dissenting Rafi member, Yitzhak Peretz, refused to go along and said he would consult with colleagues on the possibility of forming a separate Rafi ticket. Others indicated they would prefer to return to Likud.
Telem’s chances of becoming a major force in the next Knesset are diminishing rapidly according to public opinion polls. The latest survey gave the party a maximum of 4-5 seats in contrast to the 15 seats predicted by the polls when Dayan announced its formation earlier this month.
TEHIYA NAMES STANDARD BEARER
Meanwhile, the ultra-nationalist Tehiya faction named Tel Aviv University physics Prof. Yuval Neeman as its standard-bearer followed on the list by Herut defector Geula Cohen and Hannon Porat, a leader of the Gush Emunim. Silva Zalmenson, a former Soviet prisoner of conscience was placed 11th on the list and right-wing MK Moshe Shamir volunteered to occupy the 16th-and last-place. He expressed confidence that Tehiya will win at least 16 mandates.
Tehiya was formed in opposition to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty and the Camp David accords. Ne’eman told a party rally on the West Bank yesterday that it “will fight for Jewish sovereignty over Judaea and Samaria as well as the Sinai.”
At the other end of the political spectrum, Mapam, a partner in the Labor Alignment, named as candidates for ministerial posts in a Labor-led government two members who stand even further to the left than the party as a whole. They are veteran MK Chaika Grossman, who would like to be Minister of Social Betterment in the next government, and Eliezer Ronnen, chairman of the company for the re-development of central Jerusalem. Both had voted in the past for Mapam to break away from its alignment with the Labor Pary.
Ronnen’s selection by the party’s central committee yesterday over Naftali Ben Moshe, the candidate favored by the Mapam leadership, came as a surprise. He is considered a representative of urban interests and is therefore unpopular with the Mopam-affiliated Kibbutz Artzi movement.
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