ISRAEL: Barring the biggest upset in Israeli political history, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will emerge victorious from today's general elections. But his success at the polls will mark the beginning of much tougher political battle: assembling a stable governing coalition.
Some four million Israelis are today expected to cast a ballot for one of the two dozen parties seeking seats in the 120-member Knesset. Every opinion survey for weeks has been predicting that Mr Sharon's Likud will attract the highest level of support, eclipsing a faltering Labour party as the largest faction in parliament.
But even the Likud's own most optimistic polls suggest Mr Sharon's party will win no more than 35 seats - leaving him with the complicated task of cobbling together a stable majority. Ideally, he would like to return to precisely the coalition he headed prior to these elections, with Labour as his junior partner.
But having spent the last two years losing its own moderate political identity while locked in the so-called "unity coalition" with the hard-line Mr Sharon, Labour's new leader, Mr Amram Mitzna, is adamant there will be no return.
Although there has been no discernable difference between the two parties regarding the military measures Israel employed to counter Palestinian attacks in the continuing intifada, they are worlds apart on a diplomatic solution. Mr Sharon will not even shake hands with the Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat; Mr Mitzna, if elected prime minister, would resume negotiations with Mr Arafat right away.
Mr Sharon grudgingly endorses the concept of Palestinian statehood, but in half or less of the West Bank; Mr Mitzna would restart peace talks where they left off under his Labour predecessor, Mr Ehud Barak, with almost all of the West Bank coming under independent Palestinian rule.
The US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, noted tellingly on Sunday that the US intended to re-engage in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with the aim of overseeing the establishment of a democratic Palestinian state in 2005, and that Israel needed to "build trust by easing the economic plight of ordinary Palestinians and by ending settlement construction".
But at the end of an election campaign remarkable for the apathy it has engendered in an electorate that long ago despaired of a quick-fix to the conflict, most Israelis seem disposed to stick with Mr Sharon's bleak determination to wait-out Mr Arafat's demise, rather than opt for Mr Mitzna's offer to revive a peace partnership that failed so ignominiously at the July 2000 Camp David summit.
If Labour holds firm to its decision to eschew Mr Sharon's coalition overtures, and if the newly popular, centrist, Shinui party, set to win 13-16 seats, holds firm in its refusal to sit in government with ultra-orthodox politicians, the Likud leader will have no choice but to set up a rightist-religious coalition.
This would mean ministerial office for the likes of Avigdor Lieberman, whose National Union party "encourages" Palestinians to leave the West Bank and Gaza for other Arab countries, and would leave Mr Sharon as perhaps the most dovish member of an extremely hard-line government.
No choice but to keep faith with Sharon: opinion, page 16