ISRAEL: Israel's acting prime minister Ehud Olmert will shortly begin talks on forming what is widely expected to be a centre-left ruling coalition to implement his plan to set the country's final borders by 2010, writes Nuala Haughey in Jerusalem
Near-final results for Tuesday's election show Mr Olmert's new Kadima party with 28 of the Knesset's 120 seats, allowing it to form the next government in a partnership likely to include the left-leaning Labor Party, which won 20 seats.
The big election shock was the implosion of the once dominant right-wing Likud party, whose hawkish leader, former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, fended off early calls for his resignation but may now face being ousted by rankled colleagues.
Likud, which Mr Olmert's predecessor, Ariel Sharon, quit last November to form the centrist Kadima, was pushed into an ignominious fifth place with 11 seats.
The collapse in the Likud vote placed the party behind the ultra-Orthodox Shas (13 seats) and the racist Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home), which polled particularly strongly to gain 12 seats as the head of a reduced but more extreme right-wing parliamentary bloc.
Mr Netanyahu failed to reignite support for his fractured party after the defection of Mr Sharon and other leading members from Likud, which has dominated Israeli politics for almost three decades.
He appears to have faced a backlash from Likud's normally solid constituency of urban poor who suffered income cuts from the tough free market economic reforms he drove through as finance minister.
Shas, a conservative faction which represents Sephardic Jews, is a strong contender to be among Kadima's potential coalition partners, as well as Gil, the single-issue pensioners' party, which defied poll predictions to secure seven seats.
Local media reported yesterday that the Labor Party had already begun talks with Shas and Gil to put together a 40-seat "social bloc" to negotiate with Kadima in talks on a ruling coalition which requires at least 61 out of the 120 parliamentary seats.
Kadima's bargaining strength in coalition talks has been damaged somewhat by a poll performance that fell short of expectations and was probably exacerbated by the 63 per cent voter turnout, the lowest in parliamentary polls to date.
However, Mr Olmert (60), who took over as acting prime minister when Mr Sharon suffered a massive stroke almost three months ago, stressed yesterday that the ruling party would not give up the three senior portfolios, the foreign, defence and finance ministries.
In his victory speech shortly after midnight yesterday, Mr Olmert appeared to make early overtures to the social reform agenda of Labor, whose Moroccan-born former trade union leader, Amir Peretz, is the first non-European Jew to lead a major party.
With coalition talks due to begin next week, Haim Ramon, a senior Kadima lawmaker, told Israel Radio yesterday that he expected Mr Olmert to have a government in place after the Jewish holiday of Passover, which begins in mid-April.
Mr Olmert, in his victory speech, challenged Palestinians to resume peace talks.
"In the coming period we will move to set the final borders of the state of Israel, a Jewish state with a Jewish majority.
"We will try to achieve this in an agreement with the Palestinians. This is our hope and prayer," he said.
A Kadima lawmaker, Otniel Schneller, said the party would initially wait for about a year before implementing the unilateral plan, to see whether militant Islamic group Hamas would moderate its views.
"I believe, regardless of who had won in the [ Israeli] elections, the Zionist position altogether, particularly that of the three parties [ Kadima, Labor and Likud], is hostile toward Palestinian rights and insists on liquidating it and wiping it out," Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal said yesterday in Lebanon.