“Relax, Arik, in an hour, you’ll be prime minister,” one adviser intoned, calling Sharon by his nickname. But the candidate wanted more than just a victory over Prime Minister Ehud Barak-he wanted a mandate. With a 25 percent margin, Sharon got his wish. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis who had voted for Barak less than two years ago, switched sides this time, backing a hardliner who only a few years ago had been the pariah of Israeli politics. Sharon got a majority from all the key sectors in the Israeli electorate, including Russian immigrants, religious voters and political centrists. The final tally showed him scoring 62.6 percent of the vote over Barak’s 37.2 percent. His victory was so crushing that two hours after voting ended, Barak announced he was quitting politics.
But Sharon’s success was not without blemish. A lower-than-ever voter turnout and a boycott of the election by Israeli-Arabs appeared to prove what analysts had been saying for weeks-that Israelis were uncertain about both candidates. For many, the election was less about crowning Sharon and more about punishing Barak, whose handling of peace talks had unleashed unparalleled fighting in the West Bank and Gaza.
Palestinians will find the new prime ministser a much tougher negotiating partner than Barak. The right-wing leader has repudiated most of Barak’s offers, which included allowing Palestinians their own state in most of the West Bank and Gaza and some of East Jerusalem. Hours after the vote, some participants in the peace process were already predicting an impasse. “If one is to judge him by his past and his election campaign proposal, there is no way one could expect any progress in the peace talks,” said Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath.
With the election behind him, Sharon now turns to forming a government. In his victory speech, he made clear that a centrist coalition-one made up of his own right-wing Likud party and the left-center Labor party-was his priority. But it won’t be easy. With Barak gone, Labor faces a succession war. His would-be heirs are not eager to link up with Sharon. If they balk, the new Israeli leader will be left no choice but to form a narrow right-wing coalition-one that could be as unstable and short-lived as the one it replaces.
On the streets, voters clearly viewed election day as a day of protest. At a kiosk on Tel Aviv’s Jabotinsky street, a trendy shopping area and a bastion of leftist politics, passers-by stopped to read on the front pages of newspapers that another Israeli soldier was killed by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. A sign stretched across the balcony of a nearby building signaled which way many Tel Aviv residents had turned: “Only Sharon Will Bring Peace,” it said. Victor Cohen, who voted early in the morning to beat the rush, says he had backed Barak in 1999 but couldn’t do it again. “I liked him, but the situation in Israel is worse than ever. So this time, I held my nose and voted Sharon.”
In neighboring Jaffa, a mixed Arab-Israeli town, most residents didn’t vote at all. At one polling station, election officials said late in the afternoon that only 50 of 1,000 registered voters had cast their ballots. Mohammed Arzav, a Jaffa resident who did show up to vote, says he chose a blank slip and penciled in “13”, the number of Israeli-Arabs killed by police during riots last October. “It’s a protest. I wasn’t going to vote Barak and I certainly wasn’t going to vote Sharon.” Israeli-Arabs in other towns taped pictures of the 13 victims to cars and drove up and down main streets, calling on people through loudspeakers to honor the dead by boycotting the election. The tactic worked. Only about 15 percent of Israeli-Arabs cast their ballots-many of which were blank.
For Barak, the former general who shot to politics in 1995, the loss of Arab-Israeli support made defeat inevitable. While Barak’s 1999 election victory spawned hope for a new era of peacemaking with the Palestinians, his rush to clinch a deal turned Palestinians away-even when his offer was more generous than any made by previous Israeli leaders. When a peace summit at Camp David in the United States collapsed last July, the talks gave way to violence in the West Bank and Gaza. Barak’s coalition, wobbling almost from day one, started crumbling less than a year after it was established. “He thinks like a military man in terms of either conquering or retreating,” says political scientist Shlomo Avineri. “But politics are much more subtle, much more ambiguous. He simply wasn’t a politician.”
