The future of Israel’s shaky coalition government is set to be decided this weekend, with the centre-left Labor party expected to announce by Monday morning whether to withdraw its support for Ehud Olmert, the embattled prime minister.
Ehud Barak, the defence minister and Labor leader, faces a difficult dilemma: last year he promised to remove the party from the coalition should Mr Olmert fail to step down before the publication of a much-anticipated report into the government’s conduct during the 2006 Lebanon war. Without Labor’s support, Mr Olmert and his Kadima party would no longer have a governing majority.
The Winograd report was eventually released on Wednesday, but while it contained harsh criticism of Israel’s political and military leadership during the conflict it failed to single out Mr Olmert for direct, personal attack.
Over the past two days, the prime minister’s Kadima party has closed ranks behind Mr Olmert, with leading party figures urging Mr Barak to rethink his earlier pledge. And while opposition leaders have repeated their demand for Mr Olmert to step down, the Winograd report has provided them with less ammunition than they had expected.
The Israeli public, too, appears to have softened its critical stance towards the prime minister, though he remains deeply unpopular. According to a poll published on Friday in Haaretz, the daily newspaper, 53 per cent of Israelis want Mr Olmert to step down. After the publication of an interim report by the Winograd committee in May last year, that figure stood at 68 per cent.
Most Israeli analysts and commentators predict that Mr Barak will try to avoid bringing down the government. They point out that new elections would almost certainly lead to a further reduction in the number of Labor seats in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.
According to polls, a new vote would return Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the right-wing Likud party, to the prime minister’s office.
Front Page Features