Hamas election tactics
Fascinating story in the San Francisco Chronicle on how Hamas organized to win the parliamentary election. Whether this professionalization and the awareness that only a quarter of Palestinian voters “cared about religion” affect their policies in office remains to be seen:
Even though more Palestinians voted against Hamas than for its candidates in the Jan. 25 election, the militant Islamist group used the skills it had honed in organizing attacks on Israel to outwit the ruling Fatah party in capturing a comfortable majority of seats in the new parliament that was set to open Saturday.
Still basking from their stunning victory, Hamas leaders recently described how they won – and how close they came to losing. In a series of interviews, senior Hamas election strategists told The Chronicle that their success was greatly helped by the failure of Fatah to unify its own ranks.
“We used scientific methods based on our study of the polls. We stayed united. We had a program which won the confidence of the voters. The Fatah candidates were split and they were putting up too many people in each district. It split their vote,” said Farhat Assad, the West Bank campaign manager for Hamas. ……
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“The polls all said the people’s first concern was about corruption, and then the security situation,” said Assad. “And they showed that 25 percent of the people cared about religion.” He commissioned further internal polling that confirmed his belief that Palestinians who traditionally did not support Hamas would respond to a message emphasizing an end to corruption, a clean and honest government and a strong stand against the Israeli occupation.
The party program was toned down — deleting references to Hamas’ charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel and the imposition of Islamic Shariah law. Finally, a batch of outside experts was called in to give advice on how to run the campaign. With the help of Yazid Khadr, a Hamas media expert, and the party leadership, the candidates decided how to answer journalists’ questions. New briefings were sent out almost daily to keep candidates up to date.