Exit Polls Show Livni’s Moderate Kadima Beats Bibi’s Hardline Likud

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1063118.html
As results from Israel’s general elections began trickling in late Tuesday, the two front-runners – Kadima Chairwoman Tzipi Livni and Likud Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu – both proclaimed themselves to be the next choice for premiership. Livni, whose party scored between 29 and 30 seats in television exit polls, praised the results, saying: “Israel has chosen Kadima and we will form the next government.”

Israel’s Livni woos female voters ahead of poll

http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSL3241715
JERUSALEM, Feb 9 (Reuters) – With Israeli pollsters predicting a close national election on Tuesday, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is wooing female swing voters whose support could help her clinch victory. Campaign ads for Livni’s centrist Kadima party splashed over billboards and across websites promise a “different kind of prime minister” and urge Israelis to elect the country’s first woman prime minister in three decades. Livni, 50, an ex-Mossad agent, had avoided playing the “gender card” for fear of appearing weak in a male-dominated society where frequent wars with Arab neighbours tend to make generals and other military figures more popular as politicians. But after failing to win enough of a boost from a 22-day offensive in Gaza that was widely popular in Israel, Livni has added feminist-tinged rhetoric to her repertoire, mixing calls to smash Hamas militants with complaints of male chauvinism. She has focused her campaign efforts in recent days on female audiences, urging them to her Israel’s first female premier since Golda Meir in the 1970s.

Elections 2009 / Haaretz exclusive: Avigdor Lieberman said to be ex-member of banned radical Kach movement

http://news.haaretz.co.il/hasen/spages/1061172.html
Yisrael Beiteinu chairman Avigdor Lieberman was once a member of the outlawed far-right party Kach, the movement’s former secretary general revealed on Tuesday. Yossi Dayan said he issued Lieberman, a prime ministerial candidate whose current electoral campaign against Israeli Arabs has provoked outrage, with a party membership card when he was still a new immigrant to Israel. “I don’t recall to what extent he was active in the movement, but if he denies [this], I am ready to testify in any forum that Lieberman was indeed a member for a short amount of time,” said Dayan. Kach was banned from running for the Knesset in 1988 for inciting to racism.