Sharon's Party Is Winner In Israel
Support for Kadima Short of Projections

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, March 29, 2006

JERUSALEM, March 28 -- The Kadima party led by acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert won the most seats in Israel's parliamentary elections Tuesday, in a vote that hinged on his plan to draw the country's final borders through unilateral withdrawals from the Palestinian territories.

But the election, which drew one of the lowest voter turnouts in Israeli history, left Kadima with an uncertain mandate to move ahead with a program that once appeared to have clear support from Israelis.

With virtually all of the votes counted, Kadima, the centrist party that Ariel Sharon founded four months ago after evacuating Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip, had won 28 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, Israel's parliament. Sharon remains in a coma after suffering a massive stroke in January, and Kadima's projected strength had slipped a dozen seats in pre-election opinion polls since then.

"It is up to us, all of us, to put a new stamp on the life of Israel," Olmert said to cheering supporters in a post-election call for unity.

Kadima did not win even half of the 61 seats necessary for a parliamentary majority, ensuring that Olmert will have to enlist other parties to form a coalition government. The most likely partner is the Labor Party under former union leader Amir Peretz, which finished second with 20 seats. Peretz expanded the founding Zionist movement's base in a campaign that emphasized raising the minimum wage, improving social services and pursuing negotiations with the Palestinians to end the conflict. The ultra-Orthodox Shas party finished third with 13 seats.

The results also signaled a dramatic shift within the political wing most opposed to leaving the Palestinian territories, a group now highly fragmented among sectarian, secular and religious-nationalist parties.

The Likud Party, led by former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, dropped further than any previous governing party, finishing in fifth place with 11 seats. Sharon led Likud to victory in the past two elections. But he left the party, long the primary sponsor of Israel's settlement movement, in November after alienating its base with his Gaza evacuation.

"The Likud has been dealt a heavy blow, the second that we have absorbed since the former head of the party left and left behind a broken, shattered movement," Netanyahu said to supporters. "We will rehabilitate our movement. We will continue on our path. We will cling to it."

The party Israel Is Our Home finished with 12 seats, making it the largest nationalist faction. The party is led by Avigdor Lieberman, an immigrant from Moldova who proposes redrawing Israel's border to exclude roughly 150,000 of the Jewish state's Arab citizens. His message attracted Israel's large bloc of Russian-speaking voters, who have traditionally supported Sharon.

"This is just the beginning of the future fight for Israel," Lieberman said to supporters. "I am proud that we have just become the largest party in the nationalist camp, and I am certain that next time we will be the ruling party."

Only 63.2 percent of Israel's roughly 5 million eligible voters cast ballots after a low-energy campaign that belied the pressing questions facing the next government. The next prime minister must determine Israel's new relationship with the Palestinian Authority, now led by the radical Islamic group Hamas, and decide how to proceed on matters of peace.

Olmert, a 60-year-old lawyer and former Jerusalem mayor, outlined plans to withdraw from scattered West Bank settlements and draw Israel's border roughly along the line of the separation barrier due to be completed next year. Jerusalem and the largest settlement blocs would remain in Israel's hands under Olmert's plan, which he said he intends to carry out before the end of his four-year term.

Under Sharon, Kadima was initially projected to win roughly 40 Knesset seats, a figure that spiked slightly after his stroke. Kadima activists were uncertain how to respond to Tuesday's results, and some focused on Likud's dismal showing rather than their party's less-than-overwhelming finish.

To build his coalition, Olmert could turn to Labor, Shas and the other ultra-Orthodox party, United Torah Judaism, the dovish Meretz and the surprising Pensioners Party, which won seven seats on a platform to improve benefits for senior citizens. The combination would give him a broad government of more than 70 seats.

"The extremists in Israeli politics have lost today -- Likud, Netanyahu have been sent deep into the opposition," said Lior Chorev, a Kadima political strategist. "We have a duty to secure the state of Israel. This is the legacy of Sharon."

Many Israelis turned out to vote on Olmert's strategy, which he told supporters he would pursue only if he determines that negotiations with the Palestinians are not possible. He told supporters that "there is no substitute for a peace agreement."

"We will never turn our backs on our desire for those locations that were the cradle of our culture and where the dearest memories of our people exist," Olmert said in a passage of his speech that he addressed to the Palestinians. "But understanding the reality and understanding the circumstances, we are willing to compromise and give up part of the beloved land of Israel in which our best sons and fighters are buried, and to evacuate with great pain Jews who live there in order to create a reality for you, so you can achieve your dream and live side by side with us in a state of your own, in peace and quiet."

In the West Bank settlement of Efrat, south of Jerusalem, residents filed into a small elementary school to reject future Israeli withdrawals from the territories.

Although Efrat would remain part of Israel under Olmert's emerging blueprint, voters such as Yehuda David, 70, cast ballots for the National Union, a coalition of nationalist-religious parties that is now the chief advocate of the settlement movement. The party finished with nine seats.

"There is an uncertainty here because of all the statements we've been hearing," said David, a retired Interior Ministry official who has lived in the hillside settlement since its creation in 1983. "We've been told our bloc would not be returned. But we don't know. We can't trust them."

Kadima's showing means that for the first time in Israel's 58-year history neither Labor nor Likud will form the next government, culminating a political realignment set off by the Gaza evacuation that analysts here called "the big bang."

Sharon argued that Israel must act alone to draw its final borders in a way that would separate a Jewish majority from the Arab population of the West Bank and Gaza. In forming Kadima, Sharon brought along a number of Likud leaders, including Olmert, as well as some from Labor. Among them was Shimon Peres, the Nobel Peace laureate who left after losing Labor's leadership to Peretz.

"The monumental choices this election was supposed to be about were actually decided beforehand," said Yaron Ezrahi, a Hebrew University political science professor. "This election came to be a measure of confirmation of this choice."

Party officials and analysts say more than 1 million voters -- about 20 percent of the electorate -- may have backed new parties this year.

Among those that benefited from the drift was the new Pensioners Party, led by Rafi Eitan, a former Mossad agent. But with his strong showing, Lieberman will likely challenge Netanyahu for the position of opposition leader in the next Knesset. The Arab bloc won 10 seats.

In the Israeli city of Bet Shemesh, more than a dozen activists from Labor, Likud, Shas and other parties swarmed voters at a polling station inside a community gymnasium.

Eliyahu Ben-Lulu, 51, said he voted for Shas because he is "a believing Jew." In some previous elections, Ben-Lulu was able to vote for a Likud prime minister and Shas members of parliament. But in this election, and the last one, voters were allowed to select only a single party list.

"I saw no other possibility," said Ben-Lulu, who used to work in a factory making munitions for Israeli military aircraft. "If I have to choose between a political and a religious way, I always choose my belief."

Taxis plastered with Kadima posters sped through the streets near the polling station.

"Olmert will continue the way of Sharon," said Mordechai Edri, 38, a gardener in Bet Shemesh who voted for Likud in the last election and Kadima in this one. "I didn't like the games Netanyahu played during the disengagement from Gaza -- supporting Sharon, opposing Sharon. And economically he went too far to the right."

Researcher Samuel Sockol and special correspondent Hillary Claussen contributed to this report.