Incumbent leads challenger Cabel 66.5% to 33.4%, likely to remain chairman of union for next five years.
By GIL STERN STERN HOFFMANHistadrut chair Ofer Eini at Labor Court_311(photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
Histadrut labor federation chairman Ofer Eini will apparently remain in charge of the powerful union for another five years, according to preliminary results of Tuesday’s race released Thursday.The Histadrut's election committee said Thursday that after having counted 175,333 of the some 200,000 ballots cast in elections for the chairmanship of the union, incumbent Eini is leading his challenger, Labor MK Eitan Cabel, 66.5 percent to 33.4%.Cabel expressed outrage that preliminary results were revealed to the media. He said the election committee and vote counters were biased in Eini’s favor.“I am not getting results in an organized way,” Cabel complained. “It is one big theft. Everything is corrupt. You can’t rely on anything the [election committee] does.”Cabel’s associates accused Eini of “deciding the results in advance.” They said there was no reason for the counting to take place over three days.“Everything we warned about has happened and more so,” Cabel’s spokesman said. “There was so much corruption. If the election was fair, the public would have chosen Cabel.”Cabel’s campaign called upon any worker who saw wrongdoing to report it. They vowed to take the election committee to court “to save the dignity of this institution [the Histadrut] that has been the victim of a mafia gang.”The election committee initially tried to prevent Cabel from running. It also disqualified the candidacy of Labor MK Amir Peretz, a former Histadrut chairman who is a fierce critic of Eini.Preliminary results indicated that Eini’s Ogenim list had received twice as many votes as Cabel’s Bayit Hevrati list.
