As much as I didn’t like Sharon and his family, obviously nobody should wish this on him or his family. His moves over the past year could be seen as crass politicization, but he did withdraw from Gaza.
His incapacitation comes at a time when power is really in a state of flux in Israel. Without him as a rallying figure, I think many reluctant Sharon supporters who have followed him from Likud will be hard pressed to stay with Olmert or gasp Perez.
What do you view as the consequences for a continued phased withdrawal? For the halting of building in the West Bank? For Gaza stability? For internal Israeli religious-political conflicts?
OK, a few more. It’s really that sudden an occurence and puts things that much up in the air. I think we’ll all be able even to set our compasses at all, let alone know in which directions things are going, only after we see how public opinion as a whole reacts over the weekend.
Most importantly, we need to wait and see whether the roughly 25% of the population that discovered suddenly that they are capable of putting a ballot in the envelope that doesn’t say "Likud"on it will, at least in part, retain that ability, or whether Likud will junp right back up to 33% in the polls. I think this will be the most important initial (as in the next few days) indicator.
It also matters whether Sharon lives and can communicate, goes into coma or a similar condition, or dies outright. This will effect people’s reactions to the situation. And we won’t know anything about this for the next few hours (alive/dead) or days (coma/in touch) either.
I have no intelligent predictions to make, even though I am concerned that it may make Bibi’s transcendence more likely and the potential birth of a true centrist party more likely to be a late-term abortion instead. But I think that it says something quite significant that this has been posted up for three-fourths of a day with only noone’s honest “dunno” as a response. I’ve been watching and waiting for some informed speculations to edify me. When this crowd is left speechless … boy.
…Middle East politics must be involved. Frankly, I’d look askance at anyone who dared predict what effect Sharon’s fall will have six or even two months from now.
This Olmert . . . I know he’s vice-premier, but what is his political allegiance? Likud, or Sharon’s new Kadima (Qadima?) party? Will he stand for PM in the coming election? If so, as which party’s candidate?
Close ally of Sharon, when they were both in Likuf. Was one of the co-founders of Qadima.
There are no personal elections in Israel – you vote for a party. Olmert is going to be running on the Qadima party list. Since none of the parties have finalized their lists of candidates yet, it cannot be said with complete certainty that he’ll be number 1 on the list (and thus the party’s candidate to be prime minister) – Qadima could theoretically still pull him and place Peres as number 1 – but that doesn’t appear (key word: appear to be where things are going. Even Peres is refraining from back-stabbing at this point :rolleyes:
And – “Vice-Premier” isn’t exactly right in the sense of equivalence to “Vice President”, but close enough, and I don’t want to derail this by starting to point out the differences. But the key difference is that, even now for the three month period leading up to the elections, the Knesset can vote to replace him as Deputy PM with any other member of his party (meaning, since Peres has not officially jumped ship, that the Knesset could choose Shaul Mofaz or Tzipi Livni to replace Olmert as Deputy, but not Peres, who still officially belongs to Labor)
I thought they recently switched to a separation-of-powers system with a PM elected directly by the voters, instead of chosen by the Knesset (which remains elected by party-list PR).
Not so recently. The PM was elected directly in the period 1996-2001 (Netanyahu, then Baraq, then Sharon in his first term).
Direct voting for PM was eliminated in 2000 (I think) – I think it was actually before Sharon was elected over Baraq, but the change back to a single vote for a party was to take “from the next parliamentary elections”, and the Baraq/Sharon vote was for PM only, following Baraq’s resignation
(I think. I may have the timeline all addled, but I can’t currently google anything worthwhile about elections in Israel in the past – all the links that come up are about the current elections – so I’m going on memory here)
I personally hope that the act of withdrawing from Gaza serves as an eye opener to the Israeli right-wing populace. I think that for the Israelis it has been quite successful. I hope that most of the center-right lost respect for the Gaza settlers when they were using their children and their religion to try and get in the way of increased security for the country at large. My prediction, if I were to make a wild guess, is that Olmert, despite his far-right background and lack of military experience, will be able to continue a similar tack than Sharon. I think that Sharon was a powerful leader, but at least for the past few years, it was less about him and his charisma than it was about his policies. I therefore hope that it will be a relatively smooth transistion of power.
I thought they recently switched to a separation-of-powers system with a PM elected directly by the voters, instead of chosen by the Knesset (which remains elected by party-list PR).