Word: sharone
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Tuesday, Ariel Sharon lead Likud to a commanding 37 seats, making him the first incumbent prime minister in almost two decades to win reelection. The win allows him to select the coalition partners of his choice, but the prime minister is refusing the option of building a narrow coalition with Likud's natural allies among the far-right and religious parties. Instead, to the consternation of his own party's base, Sharon is bending over backwards to make dove Amram Mitznah his senior coalition partner...
...Mitznah, leader of the Labor Party, is stubbornly refusing. It's easy to see why; Labor activists see rejoining Sharon in government as the kiss of death for the traditional party of peace, because such coalitions typically agree to avoid taking positions in the areas that most sharply divide their members - and in the case of Labor and Likud, those differences run to the fundamentals of what is required for peace with the Palestinians. Mitznah took over party leadership from former defense minister Benjamin Ben Eliezer precisely because Labor had lost its independent identity while serving as the junior partner...
...Sharon denying his own base in order to draw a party of reluctant doves who differ sharply with his policies into a national unity government? The answer may lie in the fact that the unspoken coalition-partner of any Israeli government is the President of the United States - the ally whose requests Israel cannot afford to ignore and whose red lines it cannot afford to cross. Sharon, of course, has no worries on that front - at least for now. He has achieved a unity of purpose with the Bush administration that few had thought possible when he was first elected...
...Still, despite the Bush administration's support for Sharon and its willingness to accommodate his political needs - Washington refrained, for example, from releasing its "road map" for peace before the Israeli election specifically in order to avoid putting pressure on Sharon - the wider U.S. interests in the Middle East and beyond inevitably put Washington into conflict with Sharon's political base, even if not necessarily with the prime minister himself. The U.S. has, for example, insisted that Israel refrain from expelling Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat from the occupied territories - a demand popular among Likud supporters, and even more so among...
...Despite his popularity and the scale of his mandate, Sharon finds himself unable to fulfill many of the wishes of his most fervent supporters, but not because of a lack of parliamentary support. That trend may even intensify if the Bush administration finds itself needing greater Arab support to manage the complex and dangerous task of occupying a post-Saddam Iraq...