Breaking
Political shakeup in Israel:
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon sacked his main coalition partner on Wednesday after a humiliating parliamentary defeat that left him scrambling to avoid early elections and save his Gaza withdrawal plan.
In a twin political drama across the Middle East divide, jailed West Bank leader Marwan Barghouthi decided to run in a Palestinian presidential election and Hamas militants vowed to boycott the vote to choose a successor for Yasser Arafat.
Sharon dismissed the Shinui party shortly after it defied him by voting against the 2005 state budget in a first reading in parliament, and aides said he would immediately approach the center-left Labour Party to prevent his government’s collapse.
This is probably good news for Sharon’s plan to pull out of Gaza, but bad news for Sharon personally. Shinui was probably already on its way out over the Gaza plan – and Labor is far more likely to support it.
However, they’ll be able to wrangle concessions out of Sharon, who is already hurting from today’s news.
A am sooooo glad we don’t have that parliamentary system.
The Euros prize stability, yet they have that cockamamie (sp) system.
Like a lover getting into a snit and flouncing out the door.
Contrary to how you read about this in the “anti-Likud” MSM, this was a deliberately ENGINEERED event by Sharon.
Sharon wants a Labor/Likud Unity government to do the tough things that need to be done vis a vis the Palis. (Unfortunately, Labor is a “pre-Thatcherite-like” Left-wing socialist party, so many on the right do not want this to happen.)
His enemies – within the Likud, and from the dovey-Left, like Yasser, er I mean Yossi Beilin – were actively trying to save the currrent coalition – TO PREVENT A LABOR/LIKUD coalition…YES : politics makes strange bedfellows..
For the straight story of Israeli politics ya gotta read BOTH Haaretz and the Jpost..
Sharon is a fantastic and brave strategist – on the military battlefield and the political one, too.
In a week or so we’ll see if this bold strategy of his will pay off.
An Interesting Political Shakeup In Israel…..
….and Stephen Green aka Vodka Pundit (back writing after an all-too-long break) has the details.
Shinui isn’t shedding any tears. They needed to get kicked out. God knows they haven’t kept many of their election promises and by voting against the budget they were able to finally save some face (and show some balls)and satiate their constituents.
The notion of forming a sort of “Grand Coalition” in Israel to deal with the Gaza withdrawal is an interesting one, but I’m not so sure it’s going to help the withdrawal in the end. As the other commenters state, there are major differences between Likud and Labor socialist tendencies, and while bringing two parties together for grand purposes might create more support, they also get bogged down in petty infighting too much. The “concessions” they want from Sharon might be too high a price from what Likud is willing to pay, especially when Likud itself is divided about the withdrawal.
I don’t know. With Arafat dead, I wonder if the urgency of fighting the Palestinians might start to fade away, and Labor might start to make peace gestures towards the new Palestinian leadership. Thus, maybe Israeli politics will start to get back to what it was in the late 1980′s, with Labor as the doves and Likud as the hawks.
They’re pretty much both hawks right now.
My Blog – Downtown Lad (Gay Conservative)
It’s all a little more tribal than that. Shinui doesn’t have any problems with Gaza withdrawal. Shinui’s constituency is the very secular middle class, and the party’s aim is to create a “normal”, i.e. secular, state. One of their major planks is to oppose the extortion of benefits by the religious parties. (This extortion is endemic in multi-party coalition systems, their pork-barrel spending.)
Sharon’s coalition was down to Likud and Shinui, not enough votes for a majority. So Sharon was reaching out to the Likud’s historic partners the religious parties. Shinui took a stand against the bags of goodies Sharon was handing them, standing on the hill of fiscal responsibility.
Some say that Shinui thought they had an agreement with Labor that there would be new elections instead of a unity coalition.