בחירתו של שלמה להט לראשות עיריית תל אביב ב־:1973 האם אות מבשר של המהפך הלאומי ב־1977?

Research into Israel’s 1977 political mahapakh (upheaval), in which the hegemonic Labor Alignment (a coalition Israel’s major socialist party and its associates) was toppled by the right-wing Likud Party, deals mainly with the national level and rarely considers the effects of local politics on the electoral upset. The most prominent event in the municipal context was the 1973 elections for the City Council of Tel Aviv, Israel’s main metropolis. In this contest, the Alignment’s local list, headed by the incumbent Mayor Yehoshua Rabinovich, was defeated by the Likud candidate,Major General (res.) Shlomo “Cheech” Lahat, who retired from active service in the summer of 1972 and turned to politics. Lahat won the campaign, his victory ending fourteen years of socialist hegemony in the Tel Aviv City Council. In this article, I examine the question of whether Cheech’s victory was the harbinger of the national-level upset or whether it traced to local factors and had a negligible effect on the national level.