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| Burg unimpressed with Labor party Photo: Avigail Uzi
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Burg: Labor should oust Barak
Former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg says Labor party has nothing to offer voters
Attila Somfalvi
The Labor party's poor showing in the polls breaks the hearts of veteran Labor members. One of them is Avraham Burg, who left the political establishment several years ago in favor of the business world.
However, Burg continues to follow the political scene and has been unimpressed, to say the least, with the way his former party had been conducting itself.
"The Labor party has been deceased for many years now," the former Knesset speaker told Ynet in a rare interview. "It is a party that has nothing to offer in terms of political substance."
Burg usually refuses to comment on the political situation when approached, saying that he has no authority to criticize from the outside. However, a little more than a year ago he agreed to offer his support to Ehud Barak; now, in light of the difficult crisis faced by the party, he agreed to talk – and Barak likely won't be happy to hear it.
"The big move which Labor must undertake is to oust Barak before the elections," Burg says. "However, that won't happen."
The former Labor official says voters do not feel connected to Barak, while most Knesset members fail to understand him.
"The few who do understand Barak don't want him," Burg says. "Barak does not speak the language of the people or the language of party activists…his standing in the polls will improve, but the fundamental problem of a leader who has no support is a critical matter."
Burg says that Labor has failed to serve as effective opposition when it was not in power, thereby failing to offer the public hope for change.
"In the United States, when the Republicans screwed up, the Democrats offered hope and change," he says. "Labor must go for a clear campaign: Either we form a government, or constitute an alternative in the opposition. The terrible psychological thing is that Labor has turned into a no-alternative. Labor has internalized the fact that it is like a battered wife."
By now, the Labor party cannot offer an alternate agenda on any front, Burg says. In the economic arena, he says, Labor's voters are in fact capitalists who merely resort to socialist rhetoric.
"They want middle class," he says. "The economic side has gone to hell."
Burg adds that Barak has failed to evacuate any settlement, and therefore Labor cannot present a peace agenda.
"As to the security agenda, the party has two rivals there: Shaul Mofaz and Moshe Yaalon, who has already started the war against Barak," Burg says. "Yaalon will say that Barak is in fact the same as Olmert,"
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