"You're not going to get a word out of me about what will happen after the elections," Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Barak told reporters yesterday. "To my mind, only one thing matters: to focus on the most fateful elections in Israel's history. The choice is between a candidate whose extremism knows no limits, and a man who has the strength to make decisions that on one else has been able to make."
To Mr Barak, of course, the extremist is his rightwing challenger Ariel Sharon, and the decision-making strong man is none other than the prime minister himself. But the Israeli electorate evidently sees things differently, and has already made its choice: the prime ministerial elections are only three days away, Mr Sharon is still 17 to 21 per cent ahead in the polls, and Mr Barak is just about the only politician who won't contemplate what will happen the day after February 6th, when Mr Sharon is confirmed as Israel's leader.
Indeed, with the hardline Likud leader's victory so thoroughly assured - nothing short of his own spontaneous combustion would appear capable of halting his march to the Prime Minister's Office - the election itself has actually ceased to be the main subject of political debate in Israel. Against a background of continuing Israeli-Palestinian violence - there were heavy clashes yesterday in Hebron and Ramallah, following the deaths of two Israelis and Palestinians the previous day - the focus has shifted, instead, to the critical subject of just what kind of government incoming prime minister Sharon will be able to construct.
The way Mr Sharon tells it, his overriding goal is unity. "I will set up a government of national unity," he has been promising, "a responsible, serious, peace-seeking government. And in its ranks will be the very best people." As with most issues in the past few weeks of campaigning, he has been parsimonious with the specifics, but he has spoken of inviting the defeated Mr Barak to serve as his minister of defence, and his predecessor as Likud leader, Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu, to act as his foreign minister.
Mr Netanyahu, who would almost certainly have been marching towards the Prime Minister's Office himself had he not chosen to drop out of this campaign two months ago, is unlikely to take up the offer. He has been formally supporting Mr Sharon's candidacy, but he has not played a prominent role in the campaign, and is clearly planning a comeback, sooner rather than later, as prime minister in a parliament comprised of political forces more to his liking than the current Knesset constellation. Mr Netanyahu publicly derides Mr Sharon's notion of a Likud-Labour unity partnership, and his loyalists in the Likud party and other factions, who have no particular affection for Mr Sharon, are likely to spend the next weeks and months working behind the scenes to oust the freshly elected Mr Sharon, force full parliamentary elections, and prepare to hail prime minister Netanyahu.
But what of Mr Barak and his Labour Party? Will his colleagues eject the defeated leader? Who might replace him? And will Labour agree to partner Mr Sharon in government? These are the key questions that will determine whether Mr Sharon heads a relatively moderate coalition, in which rightwing tendencies to ratchet-up the level of confrontation with the Palestinians might be tempered by more moderate voices from the Labour ranks, or whether he leads a uniformly hardline cabinet of right-wingers, ultra-Orthodox rabbis and immigrant leaders.
If Labour stays out of government, Mr Sharon, of necessity, will have to woo every rightwing and ultra-Orthodox party in the Knesset just to achieve a parliamentary majority, and to offer ministerial roles to the likes of immigrant leader Avigdor Lieberman, a former Netanyahu aide who has already suggested that Israel might target Lebanon, Egypt and Iran if provoked into violence. Some Labour officials privately suggest that this would suit them just fine, since the public would swiftly come to revile such a government, and the renaissance of the moderates would be accelerated.
But others - failed would-be prime ministerial contender Shimon Peres among them - worry about the damage a rightwing/Orthodox coalition could cause, and are privately advocating the unity partnership. The decision on whether to join or not to join Mr Sharon will, of course, be made by Labour's leader. Whether this will be Mr Barak will largely depend on the scale of his defeat. Should he lose "respectably" to Mr Sharon on Tuesday - by a margin of, say, 55 to 45 per cent - he might be able to resist a long line of would-be successors. A loss on a larger scale, though, would almost certainly see those challengers stepping up to the plate.
Then again, the defeated Mr Barak might well choose to take the "Netanyahu option": Before a single vote had been counted in 1999, Bibi, aware that Mr Barak had trounced him, announced to his party faithful that he was taking "time out" from politics, handed over the leadership to Mr Sharon, and disappeared before the scent of failure could attach itself to him.
Come Tuesday night, Mr Barak might be forgiven for wanting to drop out, disappear, and work on emulating Mr Netanyahu's quick-fire rehabilitation.