Enter Barak

As election campaigns go in Israel, this one was long and convoluted with 31 parties and, until just before the polling day, five prime m...

As election campaigns go in Israel, this one was long and convoluted with 31 parties and, until just before the polling day, five prime ministerial candidates in the fray. It was also one of the more bitter, even nasty contests. Happily for that country, the outcome is the most decisive in a decade, giving Labour Party leader Ehud Barak a huge, in Israeli terms, almost 10 per cent lead over Likud8217;s Binyamin Nethanyahu who became prime minister four years ago by the skin of his teeth and a margin of 1500 votes.

The decisiveness of Barak8217;s victory is not reflected in the fortunes of his party which has won a little over one-third of the seats in the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset. In Israel prime ministers are directly elected and members of the Knesset through a form of proportional representation. A Labour coalition with immigrant and secular-centrist parties is what Barak seems most likely to try to put together over the next few weeks. Such a coalition sounds far more coherent than the outgoing Likudcoalition some of whose troubles arose from the disproportionate influence exercised by small extreme-right religious groups.

A massive victory margin and the chance to put together a cohesive government put Barak on a strong footing at the start of his term and much will be expected of him, therefore, at home and abroad. It is widely hoped, in particular, that this Labour-led government will be willing and able to put new life into the stalled Middle East peace process.

The last five months have been a long hiatus while the region, and no one more so than the Palestinians, waited for the Israeli people to have their say. At the end of it, it is not clear that the election has decided how far and fast the new prime minister will move on the Middle East agenda. It was one of the oddities of this campaign that neither the peace process nor for that matter the economy were a major focus especially towards the end.

The campaign was dominated by the personalities of the media-savvy, articulate, combative butessentially unreliable Nethanyahu and Barak, far less articulate but also combative and packaged by a public relations team which stressed above all his record as the most highly decorated military man in Israel8217;s history.

Nevertheless, Barak is committed to the peace process with the Palestinians and if he intends, as he says, to take Israel out of southern Lebanon within a year he will have to widen the process and start talking to the Syrians.

Although he is seen as stepping into the shoes of assassinated prime minister and celebrate peacemaker Itzhak Rabin who got Oslo rolling, Barak is at the same time expected to put a high emphasis on security. His own centre-left position as well as the previous government8217;s relentless focus on security and the right-wing immigrant parties which will probably be part of the Labour coalition all indicate that tough negotiations lie ahead. The Palestinians whose cautious welcome of the poll result shows they recognise those realities. Nevertheless they have reasonto be hopeful that the peace process starting with implementation of the Wye River accords will start moving ahead again.