Sharon quits as Labour coalition crumbles

Israel’s Labour Party has tonight voted to withdraw from Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government.

Sharon is now quitting his Likud Party to set up a new movement, kicking off a campaign for elections expected in March.

He is expected to take several prominent Likud Cabinet ministers with him into his new party, along with some from Labour – possibly including the ousted chairman, elder statesman Shimon Peres.

Likud and Labour are believed to have agreed on a March 28 election date. A formal announcement is expected tomorrow.

Sharon’s Gaza pullout, a dramatic about-face after decades of settlement building and expansion in the West Bank and Gaza, fractured his party.

The Labour decision to leave Sharon’s government came at a party convention by a show of hands, following Labour Party leader Amir Peretz’s wishes.

Rebels in the Likud faction in parliament withheld support from his initiatives, preventing him from adding two supporters to his Cabinet and demonstrating that Sharon’s government could not continue to function.

Tomorrow, Sharon is to ask Israel’s President to disperse the parliament, setting in motion a process leading to elections in March, the country’s Army Radio reported.

Advancing Israel’s election from the original November 2006 date would probably sideline Mideast peace moves and counter whatever momentum was gained from Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and part of the West Bank, completed in September.

Palestinians are also concentrating on their own parliamentary election, set for January 25, with the violent Islamic Hamas running candidates for the first time and posing a significant challenge to the ruling Fatah Party of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.

Fatah primary elections began yesterday in the desert oasis of Jericho, and as expected, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat won the nomination for the town’s only seat, election officials said today.

Increasingly frustrated by the Likud rebellion, Sharon decided on the daring step of leaving the party he helped create in 1973, according to Likud activists.

That would leave Likud as a bastion of hardline opponents to compromise with the Palestinians.

“I regret Sharon’s decision to leave and would have preferred that he continue his struggle within Likud,” said Likud MP Ehud Yatom, one of the leaders of the internal rebellion against Sharon.

At least five Likud Cabinet ministers have said they will compete for the party leadership after Sharon’s exit.

Polls in weekend Israeli newspapers showed that if Sharon remained in Likud, it would maintain much of its present strength, while the newly-elected Peretz would take Labour to a healthy increase. Sharon at the head of a new party would scramble the electoral picture completely, with Likud as the main loser, according to the polls.

This month’s surprise election of Peretz, a fiery union leader, as head of Labour accelerated the spiral toward early Israeli elections.

Labour joined Sharon’s coalition government in January to buttress support for the Gaza pullout, but in one of his first moves, Peretz extracted letters of resignation from the eight Labour Cabinet ministers last week.

In a strident campaign speech, his first as party leader, Peretz told the convention that Sharon had partially corrected his mistake of building settlements in Gaza by pulling out, but he charged that in constructing them in the first place, Sharon had wasted “billions that could have been used to turn the education system around”.

Blaming Sharon and his ex-finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu for increasing poverty and “humiliating” the poor, Peretz appealed to Israel’s lower classes, traditionally Likud voters. “Come join the new social pact,” he said, “You are not abandoning Likud. Likud has abandoned you.”

In a brief reference to Mideast peacemaking, Peretz said he favoured a united Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and opposed permitting Palestinian refugees to return to Israel – an attempt to counter efforts to paint him as an extreme peacemaker who would make far-reaching concessions to the Palestinians.

He also said creation of a Palestinian state was in Israel’s interest as well as the Palestinians’.