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ISRAEL: A Second Woman PM On Her Way

Analysis by Peter Hirschberg

JERUSALEM, Sep 30 2008 (IPS) - Just a week after Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni was charged with forming a new government, it looks as if the new leader of the ruling Kadima party is on the way to cobbling together a new ruling coalition.

There will still be a lot of horse-trading in the coming days. But with both the Labour Party and the ultra-Orthodox Shas party in serious negotiations with Livni, who won a party leadership race to replace Prime Minister Ehud Olmert earlier this month, she seems to be on course to become Israel’s second woman prime minister, after Golda Meir became the first, almost four decades ago.

To form a coalition, Livni will have to contend with Shas’s demand that the future of Jerusalem be kept off the table in negotiations with the Palestinians. The foreign minister, who under Olmert has been responsible for talks with the Palestinians, will clearly want to continue on this track if she becomes prime minister. But Shas’s demand is a non-starter for the Palestinians, who insist that all issues at the core of the conflict, including borders and refugees, must be on the table.

Shas’s demand will also not sit well with the centre-left Labour Party, which strongly supports talks with the Palestinians, and who Livni needs if she is to form a government.

But Shas’s key demand has nothing to do with the peace process. For the ultra-Orthodox party, whose constituency includes many large, lower income families, reinstating child allowances – welfare benefits for large families that were cut several years ago – is a demand they will not forgo. If Livni demurs, party leader Eli Yishai has declared, Shas will not be part of a new ruling coalition.

Finance Minister Roni Bar-On is a strong opponent of reviving child allowances. He argues that they act as a disincentive when it comes to pushing people into the job market. Bar-On was also Livni’s strongest backer, and so she will have to find a way to give Shas what it wants and keep Bar-On on her side.

Labour will probably be easier to satisfy. While party leader and Defence Minister Ehud Barak has insisted he is not ruling out going to elections, opinion polls showing that Labour would fare poorly at the polls are a strong incentive for joining a Livni-led government.

Barak is demanding that he be an equal partner with Livni when it comes to making decisions regarding talks with the Palestinians and the Syrians. Livni could agree; whether the partnership will work once the government is formed, is another matter altogether.

The coalition math is simple: With Kadima’s 29 seats, Labour’s 19 seats and Shas’s 12 seats, Livni has a total of 60 seats. Add to that two pensioners factions – with a total of seven seats – and she has a 67-seat majority in the 120-seat Knesset. If that turns out to be the coalition Livni cobbles together, it will be a mirror of the one Olmert engineered when he first entered office in May 2006.

Livni has a maximum of 42 days to form a government. If she fails, Israelis will go to the polls in a general election some time early next year. While opinion surveys show a Livni-led Kadima in a tight race with former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s centre-right Likud party, the polls also show that Netanyahu would have a greater chance of forming a government because the right-wing bloc would win more seats.

The 50-year-old Livni, who once worked for Israel’s Mossad spy agency, entered politics a decade ago as a Likud member of parliament. Initially a strong opponent of territorial compromise with the Palestinians, Livni’s views changed. In 2005, she left Likud.

If Livni becomes prime minister, she can be expected to push ahead on the Palestinian track and also possibly in talks with the Syrians, which Olmert renewed earlier this year. With elections scheduled for November 2010, she will have a maximum of two years in office.

If she has hopes of occupying the prime minister’s office beyond 2010, she will want to be in a position to present the Israeli people with some type of deal with the Palestinians – or possibly the Syrians – when they next go to the polls.