Word: likud
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...18th-floor suite in the Sheraton Moriah, Ariel Sharon's close advisers and supporters gathered at 10 p.m. last Tuesday to watch the results of Israel's prime-ministerial election. Sharon, the Likud Party's candidate, sat directly in front of the television. When the newscasters announced his landslide win, the suite erupted in cheers as Sharon's people pumped the air with their fists. Only Sharon sat quietly, motionless and hunched. After his maverick, wilderness years as an outsider, the buck now stopped, dauntingly, with him. Prime Minister Ehud Barak phoned to concede. "Ehud, I want to tell...
...peace process. Labor leaders, however, are in disarray after a humiliating performance at the polls--Sharon got 62% of the popular vote, an Israeli record. Without Labor support, Sharon may have to turn hard right to form a ruling coalition. "Sharon wants a unity government," says Silvan Shalom, a Likud powerbroker. "With a narrow coalition, he'd be criticized by the Arabs, the world and half our own people...
...unity government is clearly an attempt by Israel's two major parties to calm the panic in domestic politics (once Sharon is sworn in next week, the country will have had four prime ministers in five years) and act in their mutual interest to restore the traditional Labor-Likud duopoly of power...
That would have been Sharon's fate, too, had Labor stayed out. But both Sharon and Barak have compelling motivations for wanting to make this work: The more popular Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu stayed out of the election only because he believed that a direct vote for prime minister without changing the balance in parliament would produce an unstable and short-lived outcome. He would almost certainly challenge Sharon for the party's nomination, which means Sharon has good reason to make his government last. Barak, too, faces a mounting tide of Labor party discontent with his leadership - he actually...
...unseemly haste with which Israel's Labor party has rushed to join Ariel Sharon's Likud in a unity coalition may indicate a paradigm shift in Israeli politics. After all, just two weeks ago Ehud Barak was warning Israeli voters that electing Sharon would be a national catastrophe; on Tuesday Barak was locked in negotiations over how to join Sharon in government. The outgoing prime minister also signed off on the overnight assassination of a Palestinian activist in Gaza by missiles fired from an Israeli helicopter, as a reminder that the two parties take a common view of how Israel...