TEL AVIV, Jan 27: Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s right-wing Likud party maintained its commanding lead in the last opinion polls before Tuesday’s general election, but he looked set to struggle to form a stable coalition.
The surveys in the mass-circulation Yedioth Ahronoth and Maariv newspapers on Monday showed Likud winning 32 to 33 seats in the 120-member parliament, compared with 18 to 19 for its nearest rival, the centre-left Labour Party.
The centrist Shinui party, shaping up as a kingmaker, was forecast to capture 15 to 16 seats.
Mr Sharon, 74, has made security and a refusal to negotiate peace with the Palestinians until anti-Israeli violence ends the bedrock of his election campaign.
The latest surveys indicated that Sharon, enjoying a swing to the right by an electorate angry at the Palestinians, could put together a narrow coalition of right-wing, ultranationalist and religious parties controlling some 65 seats.
But such a government could put Israel at odds with U.S. policy to encourage Palestinians to end violence and embark on reforms as a step to statehood and could delay domestic measures to pull Israel out of a recession.
A coalition dependent on right-wing parties also would likely struggle to survive.
Israel’s battered financial markets, suffering from the uprising and a global slowdown, prefer to see a secular unity government led by Likud, Labour and Shinui to address pressing budget cuts and economic reform, economists said.
But Labour Party leader Amram Mitzna has publicly rejected Sharon’s call to join a new coalition after elections, while Shinui refuses to sit in government with religious parties.
Mitzna joined other Labour leaders to phone voters on Monday night and win their support in a last-ditch effort to prevent a debacle for their party, at present the largest in parliament.
“Don’t give up. Look to the future,” Mitzna wrote in a signed personal appeal published in Israeli dailies on Monday. “The Labour Party is the only alternative to a right-wing and ultra-Orthodox government.”
Mitzna, a former general, advocates immediate peace talks with the Palestinians and unilateral Israeli pullbacks from occupied areas of Gaza and the West Bank should they fail.
In an apparent bid to woo back supporters now in the nationalist camp, the spiritual head of Israel’s largest religious party rescinded on election eve his long-standing ruling supporting land-for-peace deals.—Reuters