Israeli voters hand Sharon strong victory

Tel Aviv - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his rightist party, Likud, crushed Israel's Labor Party in parliamentary elections here Tuesday night, as voters vented their doubts about any prompt, secure end to the bitter conflict with the Palestinians.

Amram Mitzna, Labor's chairman, called Mr. Sharon to concede less than an hour after polls closed at 10 p.m. Israeli television projected that Likud could win almost twice as many seats as Labor in the 120-seat Parliament.

Based on results from 99.9 percent of the polling centers, Likud won 37 seats, and Labor only 19 — the fewest ever for the party with a mighty past.

Labor appeared still to be paying for Israelis' disillusionment with the Oslo accords, the all-but-dead 1993 agreement that was to have created a new era of peace and prosperity in the Middle East. Mr. Sharon, despite his as yet unfulfilled promise of peace and security, is widely viewed as the most dependable leader in a time of deep uncertainty.

Another clear winner was an anti-religious party, Shinui, which appears to have surged to 15 seats from 6 in the last Parliament.

The party's name means "Change," and its rise reflected in part a protest against Israel's status quo. It also reflected frustration with the benefits and privileges the state offers to highly observant Orthodox Jews, subsidies that Shinui has vowed to curtail.

"We will change the face of Israeli society," vowed Shinui's leader, Tommy Lapid, at the party's boisterous headquarters here.

Likud's supporters, meanwhile, welcomed their leader with chants of "Arik — king of Israel!" as they packed by the hundreds into the party's hall here. Quieting the crowd, Mr. Sharon, who has favored fierce military reprisals over negotiation to contend with the Palestinian uprising, presented himself as more determined than jubilant. He declared that Israel had unfinished work, from fighting terrorism to repairing its economy.

He began a new, more difficult political campaign to form a stable coalition government. For that, he may need to cajole Labor to abandon a pledge not to join him in a broad grouping of right and left. "Israel needs unity, Israel needs stability," he said, flanked by new Likud legislators. "Israel needs both quickly, before the crisis deepens further."

As a whole, the electorate's frustration and impatience for change have been only partly masked by Mr. Sharon's broad personal popularity, a source of Likud's victory. "It's all a vote against, not for," said Shmuel Sandler, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University, of the outcome.

Israel registered its lowest voter turnout ever — which at 68.5 percent is still a level of participation that the United States might envy. Nearly 79 percent of voters cast ballots in the last parliamentary elections, in 1999.

Politicians and political scientists said some voters sat on their hands in the belief that Mr. Sharon's victory was assured. But they said others stayed away out of anger at corruption scandals or despair of any party's curing Israel's ills.

Even so, Mr. Sharon's overpowering victory was a further sign of his dominance of Israel's center, and of the trust Israelis place in him, a scarred 74-year-old veteran of the nation's founding and its subsequent wars. Once a political pariah for his conduct of Israel's war in Lebanon, he was elected as Likud's placeholder candidate two years ago, when former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided not to run.

On the campaign trail, even Mr. Sharon's Labor critics found themselves referring to him by his nickname, Arik, with affection.

Yet his very success against Labor could pose a problem for him, and for President Bush. It might result in the narrow, rightist government that Mr. Sharon says he wants to avoid — and that would make the Bush administration strain to wring concessions from Israel in seeking an end to the conflict.

With Labor so diminished, Mr. Sharon might have trouble within his own faction if he offers Labor the powerful, high-profile ministries, like defense and foreign — that might tempt it to join him.

And there are other reasons that Mr. Sharon may have less room to maneuver in his second term.

In 2001 he was directly elected; Israel has now returned to a system under which the prime minister is chosen in parliamentary elections. The change makes Mr. Sharon more directly dependent on his party, whose other top leaders have staked out positions to his right.

Further, he is being investigated on suspicion of conspiring with his sons to conceal an illegal foreign loan, which he used to pay back an illegal foreign donation made as he ran for his first term. He has denied the accusations but so far has also avoided addressing them in detail.

Likud is also struggling with an investigation into vote-buying in its primary.

While Labor has pledged not to sit in a Sharon-led government, Shinui, which presents itself as centrist on security issues, has pledged not to sit with Shas, the ultra-Orthodox faction that is the fourth-largest party. Mr. Sharon could be forced to build his coalition from hard-right and religious parties.

"If it's going to be a religious right-wing coalition, then it won't be so easy to go forward with the peace process, and the prime minister will probably have difficulties," said a senior Likud politician, speaking on condition of anonymity. This politician predicted that if Labor sticks to its pledge, Mr. Sharon's new coalition will not last a year.

In theory, Israel holds parliamentary elections every four years. In practice, governments usually succumb to interfactional squabbling sooner than that, forcing new elections.

In the West Bank and the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, Israelis blockaded Palestinians into their cities, tightening already severe travel restrictions. In the West Bank city of Jenin, Israeli soldiers shot and killed four Palestinians in what the army described as clashes with armed men.

With some 30,000 public and private security guards deployed at polling stations, voting occurred without incident. But it also occurred without much enthusiasm, or so it seemed. "It doesn't matter whom we elect — it's all going to be the same," said Eran Lavi, 30, as he arrived to vote in a sleepy polling station here this evening. "This is a lose-lose situation." He said he would vote Labor.

As for Labor, although it has lost ground, some of the policies it has backed have become widely popular.

Yoram Peri, a political scientist at Tel Aviv University, pointed to this seeming contradiction between the election results and numerous polls here — to the strong support for policies pushed by the left. Among them are uprooting settlements, unilaterally withdrawing from the Gaza Strip, and even the creation of a Palestinian state.

The problem, he said, is that Israelis do not trust the leaders of the Israeli left or of the Palestinians. Mr. Mitzna's calls for immediate negotiations with the Palestinians did not impress voters who believed that there was no one reasonable to talk to, or that Labor could not yet be trusted again to do the talking.

Another leftist party, Meretz, saw its position in Parliament shrink in this election. Its leader, Yossi Sarid, said he might resign. Dr. Peri said the travails of Meretz and Labor could open the way for "a new social democratic party on the left" that would "cut the ties with memories of the past."

But Mr. Mitzna and some other Labor leaders say they believe the party is also paying for its participation in Mr. Sharon's previous unity government, which blurred its image and blunted its ability to criticize Mr. Sharon's policies. That coalition lasted 19 months, until November, when Labor walked out in a dispute over financing for settlements.

Mr. Mitzna, the mayor of Haifa and a former general, vowed to revive Labor as an opposition force. "The Labor Party under my leadership will remind Sharon and the entire public every day and everywhere that there is an alternative," he told supporters here tonight. "The Labor Party has a direction, it has an identity and it has a leader."

Ophir Pines-Paz, Labor's secretary, found cause for hope in noting that Likud had only 19 seats in the last Parliament. "And look at them now," he said.

He could also have noted the rise of the National Union, a far-right party led by Avigdor Lieberman that was not represented in the previous Parliament but won seven seats in this one.

Mr. Mitzna and Mr. Sharon plan to meet soon, and Likud politicians said that Mr. Sharon would continue to press Labor to join him. Other Labor leaders resisted Mr. Mitzna's pledge not to join Mr. Sharon, and while his party rallied around him tonight Mr. Mitzna could face a challenge for its leadership.

Further, politicians said, a national emergency like a war in Iraq might provide a face-saving way for Labor and Shinui to climb down from their positions and join a broad-based government, which the public broadly supports. -- New York Times

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