RAMALLAH, 7 January 2005 — Mustafa Barghouti trails badly in opinion polls, has the backing of no major party and is challenging the Palestinians’ most powerful political machine. But he insists he is no long shot in the race to replace Yasser Arafat.
The 50-year-old democracy activist has portrayed himself as a man of the people, a reformer whose promise to tackle rampant graft in the Palestinian Authority and build strong social services for the poor will carry him to victory in Sunday’s election.
“People are fed up with the system, they are fed up with corruption, they are fed up with favoritism,” he said, “and people want change.”
Barghouti, a physician, is well known throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip because of his work running a health care think tank and a pro-democracy organization.
In 1991, he participated in the Madrid peace conference that paved the way for peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians.
But Barghouti has little formal experience in government and was an afterthought in the presidential race until jailed uprising leader Marwan Barghouti, a distant relative, dropped out last month.
That left him as the top — though badly trailing — challenger to the new PLO leader, Mahmoud Abbas, who inherited one of Arafat’s main positions and is running for the other one in the Jan. 9 presidential election.
A poll published Sunday by the independent Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research gave Barghouti 22 percent support to 65 percent for Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen. The poll of 1,319 people had a margin of error of 3 percentage points.
Barghouti dismissed the polls as biased and in some cases fabricated and said a coalescing bloc of the downtrodden — women, youth and the poor — will propel him to victory.
“It’s the birth of a huge democratic force, which I think represents the majority, the silent majority, in Palestinian society,” he said.
Like Abbas, Barghouti has demanded Israel pull out of the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, release Palestinian prisoners and allow the return of refugees who left during the war following Israel’s founding.
But his campaign has focused mainly on internal Palestinian issues. He has demanded major reforms in the Palestinian Authority and its security forces, including an end to nepotism. He has called for judicial reform and the creation of strong democratic institutions.
He has pushed for better health care and social services, more student loans and increased job opportunities.
But where Abbas has the backing of the ruling Fatah movement’s political machine, Barghouti has to rely on other methods to generate publicity and buzz for his campaign.
He’s put up posters throughout the Gaza Strip and West Bank and volunteers in the impoverished coastal strip have gone door to door to promote him. He traveled to the Gaza Strip repeatedly in recent weeks, visiting hospitals and refugee camps.
He has also courted arrest — seemingly by design — publicly announcing he was in Jerusalem without a permit on one occasion and defiantly approaching puzzled Israeli soldiers at a roadblock on another.
He said he was beaten by soldiers at a checkpoint near the city of Nablus. The military denied that, saying soldiers briefly held Barghouti when he refused to provide his identification.
Last week, Israeli police briefly detained Barghouti for being in Jerusalem illegally.
Though Israel has said it would ease restrictions for campaigning candidates, Barghouti has said he does not want special treatment, preferring to suffer the hardships that ordinary Palestinians do — though his campaign office sends out bitter news releases complaining about his treatment.
“I’m a grass roots person and I’m running a grass roots campaign,” he said on a recent campaign swing through the markets, shops and restaurants of his home town of Ramallah, where he was greeted with enthusiasm.
But Barghouti’s campaign has yet to attract large support outside of Ramallah, a well-educated city, where his family has deep roots.
Many in the West Bank city of Nablus said they preferred Abbas, though a few praised Barghouti’s polished television presence and said he would make a good spokesman for the Palestinians overseas.
Barghouti did get a small boost last week when he received the endorsement of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a small leftist PLO faction.
Few give Barghouti much chance of winning, but a respectable showing could turn him into a political force, boosting his reform agenda.
