The Tzipi Livni Party issued its final campaign appeal on Monday, sending
messages to undecided voters from the party’s founder and its No. 5 candidate,
Meir Sheetrit.
The party is only expected to garner six mandates, the
same as Meretz and United Torah Judaism, according to a Smith Research poll
published in The Jerusalem Post on Friday.
However, Livni says that her
party may garner additional mandates as, she claims, “80 percent of undecided
voters are equivocating between The Tzipi Livni Party and another
party.”
Livni addressed those voters still on the fence through a
prerecorded message that was sent to hundreds of thousands of phones throughout
the country.
Livni also released a YouTube video in which the former
foreign minister and former Kadima Party chairman expressed her hope that when
members of the public “ go behind the curtain” to cast their ballots, they will
“not leave the country in the hands of extremists.”
Continuing in this
vein, Livni said that she is “fighting for the Zionist dream” and admitted that
she is “not innocent of political mistakes” but that she has always “preferred
the national considerations to personal ones.”
Livni’s statement was
likely intended as a jab at Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who was recently
castigated by former Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin over allegations that his
decisions on the Iranian issue have been tainted by personal
concerns.
Livni continued calling for Netanyahu’s ouster in a campaign
appearance at Tel Aviv’s upscale Azrieli Mall, saying that Israel requires a
premier with “leadership experience.”
Addressing onlookers, Livni said
that she and the candidates on her list “know what needs to be done to remove
Israel from international isolation, to harness the world to protect our most
vital interests and to restore economic growth.”
“We did it once and we
can do it again,” she declared, saying that it would take a change in national
priorities to do so, including strongly promoting the peace process and a
negotiated settlement with the Palestinians.
Livni called on the “large
number of undecided [voters] to go out and vote tomorrow and put anger and
disappointments aside and imagine, when you are alone at the polls, what kind of
country you would like to see.”
Sheetrit likewise made one last appeal to
undecided voters on Monday, posting a lengthy message on Facebook in which he
painted a grim picture of international isolation and economic
despair.
“A few days ago we proved that all the talk about a stable
economy is wrong and, in fact, Israel has a huge deficit of NIS 39 billion,”
Sheetrit wrote. “We are almost completely isolated in a world in which most of
our friends voted against us in the United Nations.
Hamas is only getting
stronger and the next round is already in sight.”
He appealed to voters
to “take a few seconds to make a reckoning and ask yourself whether you want
another four years of economic instability, isolation in the world and high
taxes, or, alternatively, a change?”