“Boot the Fake Parties” was the headline of an April 17 New York Times editorial. It called for changing the state election law that allow a political party to endorse candidates of other parties by turning over its ballot line to them. This would make it easier to “get rid of all these pretend political parties cluttering the ballot,” the Times stated.

The paper’s editors justified their proposal by pointing to Fulani’s prominence in the Independence Party and noting its role in adding votes to Republican candidates—including Bloomberg, who won the 2001 elections with 60,000 votes on the Independence Party line. They highlighted Fulani’s refusal to retract anti-Semitic statements that Jews “had to sell their souls to acquire Israel” and were then forced to “function as mass murderers of people of color.”

The New York Post on April 18 reported that Sheldon Silver, the Democratic leader in the New York state assembly, commented that a move to repeal the law allowing such endorsements is “something I would look at. It’s probably not a bad idea.”

Martín Koppel, the Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor of New York, said May 31, “Our campaign opposes any effort to restrict the right of parties to endorse the candidates they choose and in this way to limit their right to appear on the ballot.

“Such a move represents an attack on working-class parties. It is an attempt to reduce the space for working people to engage in debate, advance their own class interests in the electoral arena, and break from the stranglehold of capitalist parties.”

Koppel noted that the proposed restriction could be used to try to prevent the SWP or another party from using its ballot space to endorse an independent working-class candidate if such an opportunity arose.

Socialist Workers campaigners will hit the streets in July to collect 20,000 signatures—well above the required 7,500—to place the working-class slate on the ballot for the November elections.

New York state’s election law allows candidates to run on multiple lines, which has allowed cross-endorsement of Democrats or Republicans by smaller capitalist parties. It’s through such “fusion tickets” that Republican candidates have been able to win major offices in New York, long dominated by the Democratic machine. Besides Bloomberg, his predecessor Rudolph Giuliani used the endorsement of the Liberal Party to win election in 1993. The previous two Republican mayors here, Fiorello LaGuardia (1934-45) and John Lindsay (1966-74), also ran on fusion tickets.

The demise of the Liberal Party has led to the formation of the Working Families Party, which runs “pro-labor” candidates while endorsing the Democrats for major races.

The New York Independence Party grew out of the electoral apparatus set up by billionaire Ross Perot for his 1992 presidential bid. It still draws on elements of Perot’s anti-establishment demagogy, which attracts middle-class elements fearful of the growing economic uncertainty.

Fulani’s Jew-hating comments are part of the stock-in-trade of the rightist political organization of which she has long been a leader. That group, whose guru is Fred Newman, originally identified itself as Marxist, with Maoist influence. Over the decades it evolved sharply rightward, using radical demagogy sprinkled with socialist verbiage, race-baiting, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy theories.

The Newman-Fulani outfit briefly joined Lyndon LaRouche’s fascist outfit in the mid-1970s. As the New Alliance Party, it ran Fulani for president in 1988 and 1992, and became notorious for using the courts to try to throw communists and other third-party candidates off the ballot.

The New Alliance Party dissolved and its cadres oriented to the Perot milieu, including the New York Independence Party. Fulani briefly allied herself with fascist-minded politician Patrick Buchanan, serving for a time as cochair of his 2000 campaign. Since then her group has based itself in the Independence Party, capturing some key positions in it.  
 
 
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