TEL AVIV: Having stepped in for the comatose Ariel Sharon and waged a tough-talking campaign to win Israel's election, Ehud Olmert hoped to receive a mandate for his central policy: a partial withdrawal from the West Bank.
But one day after the vote, Mr Olmert's chances of carrying that through already look threatened by the meagre extent of his Kadima Party's victory and by the Hamas's takeover of the Palestinian government.
Mr Olmert's plan, inherited from Prime Minister Sharon, who went into coma after a Jan 4 stroke, is to pursue go-it-alone pullouts from remoter Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and set Israeli borders in the absence of peace talks.
But the centrist Kadima Party's election tally was so scant -- 28 of parliament's 120 seats -- that the win will be offset by having to form a coalition with factions that do not entirely concur with Mr Olmert's so-called ‘convergence plan’.
A long-term champion of Israeli unilateralism because of stalled peacemaking with the Palestinians, Mr Olmert could now find his own term in office -- assuming he can put together a government -- curtailed by domestic deadlock.
"Bargaining will be difficult," said Israeli analyst Ephraim Inbar. "In the past 20 years we've seen coalitions that do not hold. This probably won't either."
Kadima's most natural ally is the centre-left Labour Party, which took 20 seats in parliament. Labour is expected to demand key cabinet portfolios such as finance or defence, a move bound to sow bitterness among Mr Olmert's top party colleagues.
Other candidates are the kingmaker right-wing factions such as Yisrael Beiteinu and the ultra-religious Shas. But despite Mr Olmert's vows to hold on to major settlement blocs in the West Bank, these will not be keen to see isolated enclaves evacuated.
Mr Olmert lacks the commanding charisma that helped Sharon push through last year's Gaza Strip withdrawal. Mr Olmert's plan is more sweeping, and risks greater Israeli infighting. Evacuating 8,500 settlers from Gaza was trouble enough but he wants to remove some 60,000 from the West Bank.
STATUS QUO: The factor most affecting Mr Olmert's prospects -- and most out of his control -- is the Palestinian election win by Hamas, sworn to the destruction of the Jewish state.
The group, which formed a government in the West Bank and Gaza on Wednesday, was firm in its refusal to call off ‘jihad’ against the Jewish state. But wary of losing mainstream Palestinian support and Western donor aid, Hamas is more or less observing a truce.
"The Hamas status quo is the main factor here," said analyst Gerald Steinberg.
"It will be very hard for any political constellation, especially a weak Kadima leaning to the left, to implement another withdrawal in the West Bank, because there is concern that, any day, Hamas could resume terrorism," he said.
Palestinians accuse Israel of using their 5-year-old uprising as a pretext for cementing its hold on West Bank land and denying them a viable state.
"Just like quitting the Gaza Strip, any new unilateral pullout from the West Bank will be a victory of the Sharon-Olmert plan at the expense of the Palestinians," said Palestinian analyst Hani Labib. It is far from clear that the United States would endorse the effective annexation of West Bank areas.
Washington backed the Gaza withdrawal in the stated hope it would be a step toward implementing the internationally formulated roadmap to peaceful Palestinian statehood.
But the terms of that plan have not been respected by either side and, for now at least, it looks like a dead letter.
"They (Kadima) are in a testing period. A little humility would not hurt," Nahum Barnea wrote in Israel's biggest newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.—Reuters
