Red flags over Haifa, or a performance of political magic

Historical material. Dates, proposals and invitations refer to the time of the original publication.

Cover photograph: Yoss Stybel, 2013 · original photograph · License CC BY-SA 3.0. Framing adapted with AI; this is a processed version, with the original photograph retained separately.

30 October is approaching: the big day in the political spectacle of elections for mayors and local councils.

A Thousand and One Nights before Haifa's election

Following the rules of show business, the closer the finale of a political contest, the grander candidates' promises and the more radical the threats presented to voters must become to hold the participants' interest.

Every candidate appears confident of victory, every deal has been struck, and seemingly every tool and argument in the battle for voters' minds has been used. Campaign headquarters need only reap the rewards of their political consultants and canvassers.

In the remaining hours, we can step back from what the mayoral candidates have said and use examples to examine the main techniques for influencing potential voters and manipulating their opinions in the spectacle of local elections.

Two serious contenders have emerged in Haifa's mayoral race: incumbent Yona Yahav and city council opposition leader Einat Kalisch-Rotem. The victories and defeats of the mayor who has occupied the chair for 15 years are visible to everyone; to analyze the other side of the spectacle, it is worth examining his main rival's campaign.

The drama of Haifa's mayoral election needs its own fabulist to describe the emotional suffering, unexpected joys and answers to the eternal Russian questions: 'What is to be done?' and 'Who is to blame?'

It is less an election than the plot of an oriental fairy tale: the heroine, opposition leader Einat Kalisch, fights evil forces for a brighter future. There are the intrigues of evil forces that prepared the paperwork incorrectly and led to her removal from the race, the suspense of appeals through the courts, and the victory of good with the help of supernatural powers embodied by the High Court of Justice. Everything points toward an epic first-round triumph of good over evil.

But let us return from the fairy tale to reality. In one Haifa Likud campaign video, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tells local Likud list leader Shimshon Ido that people should vote Likud to lower the red flag over Haifa. Conversely, the Israeli news website News Press argues that Kalisch-Rotem gives Labor its first chance in many years to raise the red flag over the city again. The left-right confrontation remains relevant to local election campaigning, and not only in Haifa.

The vivid image of red flags, symbolizing Israel's political left, is a tried-and-tested way to raise the adrenaline of participants in Israeli political spectacles: a scare story for part of the electorate and a weapon against opponents.

Hadar's promised paradise

Knesset elections are only planned for 2019, so the epic battle between the ideologies of political parties and projects still lies ahead.

Local elections, as Haifa illustrates, come down to dividing the financial pie of the city budget and economic projects within the city. The main battle is for the position of the city's absolute master: the mayor.

Political agreements in this struggle often amount to simple bargaining: 'We give you our voters, party members or money; after winning, the mayor gives us deputy positions and access to the city budget.' Naturally, everything is done for the city's bright future and its residents' prosperity. Such is the iron logic of political traders.

But an election does not live by bread alone. Show business requires emotion and passion, so there is also room for lofty goals and moral authorities. Voters, who do not participate in candidates' political agreements and often react inappropriately to them, may simply stay away from the spectacle of public confidence. Without motivation there can be no electoral mobilization, and without that nothing short of outright bribery will persuade voters to surrender their most coveted possession: their ballot.

Two forms of influence in the author’s analysis

01

Negative manipulation

Negative manipulation mobilizes an electoral group through hatred of another part of the population. Russian speakers, for example, are set against Arabs. Candidates from ultra-religious parties rally their followers through hostility toward Russian speakers. Russian-speaking candidates reciprocate by releasing videos that frighten voters with the prospect of Haredi domination.

02

Positive manipulation

Positive manipulation attracts voters with mayoral candidates' lofty goals for transforming their surroundings. The internet is full of slogans and election promises to turn Haifa into a garden city, create a paradise in Hadar or transform northern Israel's industrial center into a UNESCO site, from which Israel had announced its withdrawal.

In theory, two main forms of manipulation are used to intensify the emotions and passions of grassroots participants in elections: negative and positive.

The slogans and appeals of negative manipulation that candidates feed their voters are tools of electoral control without substantive political meaning. For example, the Yisrael Beiteinu city council list, whose campaign stirred anti-Arab sentiment among Russian-speaking voters, nevertheless joined Labor and Meretz in supporting Einat Kalisch: left-wing parties pursuing what may broadly be described as pro-Arab policies. Nor did red flags over Haifa frighten David Etzioni, who had presented himself as a right-wing fighter against Arab domination.

Negative manipulation also targets what Ukrainians call the 'predecessors': the incumbents supposedly responsible for all the horrors used to mobilize voters. Experience shows that a city's new rulers can continue blaming those predecessors for their own policy failures for many years.

But voters do not live on fear alone.

Date clarification: on 29 October 2018, Israel’s withdrawal from UNESCO had not yet taken effect. It became effective on 31 December 2018; the wording has been corrected using UNESCO’s record. The source is preserved in history.

For example, it is difficult to assess the importance of several electric escalators from Talpiot Market to Central Carmel. Yet, according to Einat Kalisch, who holds a doctorate in urban planning, these would turn Hadar into a tourist center. The main benefit is that people would no longer need to use the stairs. It would indeed be convenient to ride an escalator up from Talpiot Market with shopping bags, surrounded by artists' workshops, bars and shops.

I do not know how much this project would cost, but it is evidently absent from Haifa's master plan. Funding it would require the ad hoc approach to city planning that the opposition's prospective mayor opposes so strongly.

Grand promises in positive manipulation diverge sharply from the geopolitical and economic processes in which Haifa is already involved, or feed off the predecessors by promising changes and projects already approved by the old administration.

The charisma of populism

The bright future in candidates' election platforms is usually a manifestation of the electorate's wishes. Through positive manipulation, a candidate exploits the fears, basic needs and myths of different social groups.

Discussion of concrete problems is replaced by discussion of groups' values and expectations. There are several reasons for this:

• the complexity of the socioeconomic and political problems the candidate promises to solve;
• the need to change the sociopolitical system whose operation created those problems;
• the lack of practical capacity to solve the stated problems given the city's real socioeconomic situation.

These are the main causes of political populism, observable in elections not only in Israel but in many other countries.

Haifa's mayoral election is interesting because manipulation and political populism are combined with the promotion of a charismatic leader. This is unusual in local elections, since charisma as a major political campaigning resource is used more often in national contests.

A charismatic leader cannot exist without populism and techniques of influence associated with totalitarian cults. I repeat: the only campaign employing the charismatic-leader approach was that of mayoral candidate Einat Kalisch-Rotem.

Here are some principles of cult practices that became particularly visible during the election:

• an emphasis on the leader's charisma and personal contact with the leader as a condition of entering the group;

Rather than focusing volunteers on spreading information, the campaign organized them around bringing voters to personal meetings with the candidate. The underlying assumption was that the candidate's charisma would do the rest.

• dividing the world into insiders and everyone else as outsiders;

The unwillingness to hear objective arguments from the other side led to wholesale blocking of opponents on social media and constant use of internal opinion polls to sustain positive expectations among the charismatic mayoral candidate's supporters.

• aggressive promotion of group values and rejection of discussion;

Supporters actively posted personal appeals using similar arguments and the charismatic leader's values. These texts appeared to work through empathy with voters' expectations and fears. Both campaign staff and active volunteers for Einat Kalisch published their revelations, emotionally reposting and commenting on one another. As I understand it, the Russian-language campaign newspaper issued by her headquarters shortly before the election also included these empathetic appeals as an important component.

The charismatic figure must also avoid debates with other candidates. First, the figure stands above everyone else, almost a beacon of hope. The candidate must not stoop to face enemies seeking to discredit them with improper questions. Second, for members of the electoral cult, the candidate's distance from other candidates confirms their uniqueness.

• portraying the leader as the savior not only of group members but also of misguided city residents who must support the leader to save their living environment;

Social animals, including humans, are said to have a hierarchical instinct connected with individual self-preservation and sexual instinct. Hierarchy in a cult, as in society, is intended to minimize conflict within the group and make coexistence safer. People tend to fit into simple, understandable hierarchies in which an alpha female or alpha male is seen as the main authority and savior from the world's horrors.

There is a measure, Dunbar's number, for the number of social relationships a person can maintain. The human average is 150 individuals, though it can reach 230–250 among more advanced users of the brain. Anyone outside those 150 is an outsider, provoking wariness and aggression. The group-leader-outsider model is natural to humans as social animals and underlies electoral mobilization and manipulation. Combined with totalitarian cult practices, it works extremely effectively.

Another crucial rule of such groups is that only a scoundrel or a dead person can leave. I tested this rule myself, so I can confidently say that it is fundamental to dividing the charismatic candidate's supporters into insiders and outsiders.

Instead of an epilogue: a voter's checklist

Being paranoid does not mean nobody is watching you. In the age of the internet and social media, some algorithms can learn more about you from 10 Facebook likes than your colleagues know, more from 150 likes than your parents know, and more from 300 likes than your husband or wife knows.

Political advertising has long been targeted, accounting for recipients' characteristics, political and economic priorities, values and fears. Your digital footprint subjects you to constant psychometric testing by internet giants and state institutions.

If you have managed to avoid the nets of totalitarian electoral cults, apply a few simple approaches when choosing a mayor:

• After reading an election promise, take a deep breath and ask: 'How could the candidate deliver this, and is it possible at all, given the experience of addressing this problem and its scale?'
• If someone tries to recruit you through negative manipulation, remember how many years this simple technique has been used on you and what improvements the party or candidate employing it has brought to your life.
• Remember that what matters is not the promises but the people with whom agreements are signed. If a mayoral candidate joins forces with parties, compare those organizations' political and economic platforms. It may turn out to be ordinary bargaining, including bargaining for your vote.

Alternatively, you can find peaceful confidence in tomorrow beneath the bright image of the city's charismatic man or woman — at least for the duration of the campaign.

Igor Kaminnik for carmelmagazine.info