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Barak Is in Political Quagmire
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's minority government is to be tested by crucial parliamentary votes Tuesday night on five bills calling for dissolving the Knesset (parliament) and holding an early election.
The major opposition Likud who chiefly sponsored those bills, bragged in the past days that they had garnered the support of over 61 lawmakers in the 120-seat parliament, an absolute majority required to get the bills approved in the first reading.
However, most analysts predicted that the vote will be too close to call, and it is too early to foresee the result. There is still room for Barak to maneuver to foil the Likud attempt, they believe.
Barak could choose to declare those bills as no-confidence motions, thus postponing the vote until at the earliest next Monday under the Knesset agenda rules. The rescheduling will give Barak more time to persuade opposition lawmakers to withdraw their support for early elections.
More importantly, this will keep former Foreign Minister David Levy and his brother Maxim Levy, who support the early election bills, from voting against the government because their Gesher party joined in Barak's One Israel coalition in last year's general elections.
Israeli laws stipulate that any Knesset members, who vote no- confidence in a government to which their parties belong, will be banned from running again in the next elections. At issue are only two votes, but in such a close ballot, they may turn to be vital for the fate of Barak's government.
However, the move could backfire. Because if the opposition manages to pass the no-confidence votes anyway, the Knesset will be disbanded immediately and an early election held in 90 days.
Moreover, Maxim Levy even threatened on Monday that the prospect of being banned from running again will not deter his vote; and legal experts representing Levy brothers argued that the law could be challenged in the court.
Some Barak confidants said the government should not defer the first reading of the early-election bills on Tuesday night, because in any case the bills will face further test in the second and third readings in weeks, or even in months.
Time is enough for Barak to rebuild a national emergency coalition with the hardline Likud or satisfy the demands of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, who holds the crucial 17 votes, to convince it to provide a political safety net for Barak.
These confidants argued that Likud or Shas just wanted to show their power and pressure Barak to concede more to them in future coalition talks through the early-election bills.
It is also possible that the oppositions will fail to muster the 61-vote absolute majority in the parliamentary showdown, although they surely will get a simple majority of lawmakers present.
Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg had ruled that any readings of the early election bills, according to Knesset tradition, should secure an absolute majority for approval.
The Likud appealed Burg's decision to the Supreme Court, which decided Monday that it will not announce its conclusion until more justices join the hearings.
If the Likud failed to gather an absolute majority on Tuesday and the court rules in its favor, the parliamentary face-off may evolve into a long and exhausting legal battle.
However, if the court rules in favor of Burg or the Likud even fails to secure a simple majority of Knesset members present, it will deal a significant blow to the oppositions, as they will be prevented by law from submitting similar early election bills in the next six months.
Whatever direction Tuesday night's votes may go, analysts pointed out, the peace process with the Palestinians would suffer.
The process has already been in deadlock as bloody clashes between the two sides raged on in the past two months, during which over 270 have been killed and thousands wounded, most of them Palestinians.
Now, if Barak caves in to opposition demands to suspend the peace process and "let the Israel Defense Forces win in the battle against the Palestinians," the situation on the ground might turn more disastrous; If he doesn't, his own political survival is at stake.
Barak knows very well that if he could not reach the ballot boxes with a peace agreement with the Palestinians in hands, he will surely lose the elections to former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has already widened his lead over Barak in various opinion polls.
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