January 19, 2003

Sharon's coalition scenarios

By YOSEF GOELL

With just about a week left to election day the mists seem to be lifting from the witches' cauldron of the final polling results, but not necessarily from the even more important coalition scenarios which will follow on the day after.

After weeks of yo-yoing in which public opinion polls have had the Likud cascading from over 40 seats to a low of 28, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his party seem to have recovered to somewhere in the low 30s. After having paid the price of about 10 seats for the reek of party and personal corruption that has surrounded Sharon, his family and his party, the hemorrhaging has apparently been stanched. And the Likud can safely bank on forming the next government with a faction of 30 to 34 seats.

Labor could normally have capitalized on the unmasking of Sharon's and the Likud's corruption had it not had the misfortune of being led by a political fool. The time to insist on wearing one's deeply held but politically far-out ideological heart on one's sleeve as Amram Mitzna has insisted on doing is certainly not in the midst of an election campaign. It is hard to recall a greater act of electoral folly than Mitzna's committing himself to resuming where his hapless predecessor, Ehud Barak, left off with the Palestinians, not at Camp David but at Taba, four months into the bloody uprising of Arafatian terrorism.

As Jerusalem Post executive editor and columnist Amotz Asa-El, quoting American political consultant Arthur Finkelstein, wrote: "When forced to choose between the crooks and the fools the voters ultimately prefer the crooks." ("Middle Israel," January 10).

This is all the more true when the main opposing party has its own smelly history of possibly even more accomplished "crooks." A large minority of voters will nonetheless look for parties in the middle that at least seem cleaner by comparison.

SHARON AND the Likud have weathered what would seem to be the worst of the corruption suspicions hurled at them. It is highly unlikely that anything new will be unearthed in this regard during the last week of the campaign. Additional Palestinian terror outrages during the coming days will only work in the Likud's favor. Any actual reduction in such terrorism so close to election day as envisaged by Cairo will certainly not redound to Labor's advantage.

Even with the 15 percent or so of "undecideds" at this late date it seems near certain that the "Right Bloc" the Likud and its natural religious and far-right coalition partners will garner a sufficient majority to enable Sharon to form a very narrow coalition.

Whether he will go in that direction or for his preferred broader unity government with Labor will depend on how quickly, if at all, Labor dumps Mitzna as its leader and agrees to enter such a coalition. Much will also depend on the immediate agenda of a Sharon government.

Sharon's major some would say, only achievement in his first truncated term in office was to establish and maintain his strong personal relationship with US President George W. Bush and his administration. Withstanding whatever road map the Bush Administration may have in store for Israel on the Palestinian issue following the military operation in Iraq will be impossible with a narrow coalition which depends for its life on the National Union and the NRP.

This is the main reason that Sharon has made no secret of his preference for a unity coalition with Labor. There is an even more urgent preliminary item on the agenda, however: that of exploiting the chaos of the American invasion and a possible Iraqi missile attack on Israel to make a supreme military effort to quash Palestinian terrorism and reduce it to an absolute minimum as a precondition for resuming negotiations with the Palestinians.

It is not at all certain that a chastened Labor Party involved in its own fight over its leadership will at first go along with such a step. In such a case one can contemplate Sharon's starting off with a narrow far-right coalition and several months later dumping the National Union and possibly the NRP in favor of a coalition with Labor. One of the unknowns in such a scenario is whether a majority of the Likud will go along with Sharon on such a switch.

Regarding the folly of a political leader who wears his ideological heart on his sleeve as proof of his honesty, it will be interesting to see whether Shinui's Yosef Lapid will stick to his determination never to sit in the government with a haredi party when Sharon turns to Labor.

In practical political terms it may well prove crucially important for the cause of a secular Israel for Lapid to join a Likud-Labor coalition even if it also includes a very weakened Shas. Waiting another four years in the political desert may prove the undoing of Shinui.

The writer is a retired lecturer in political science and a veteran journalist.

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