|
Pressure Grows On Barak To Step Aside In Favor Of Peres
JERUSALEM (News Agencies) - Israel's caretaker prime minister, Ehud Barak, strove Wednesday to ward off pressure to drop his bid for reelection and stand aside in favor of former premier Shimon Peres, who opinion polls show has a better chance of winning.
Barak, who is running well behind right-wing challenger and Likud party chief Ariel Sharon in polls, is becoming increasingly isolated, as his bid to reach a peace deal with the Palestinians now looks all but hopeless.
"Barak will not pull out of the race," said a statement published by his office.
The statement was issued to counter allegations by a former Barak advisor, Haim Mendel Shaked, who said he had "already given up the idea of running for the election and is only waiting for the right moment to announce it."
According to Israel's electoral law, a prime ministerial candidate can withdraw from the race as late as four days before the election. That would give Barak until February 2nd to change his mind.
Recent opinion polls have been placing increasing pressure on him to step aside. The latest figures showed last Thursday that he was trailing Sharon by a whopping 28 points.
The past week has only added to Barak's grief, with the last hopes of a breakthrough in peace negotiations with the Palestinians now apparently dashed, as the postponement Wednesday by U.S. Middle East envoy Dennis Ross of a visit to the region seemed to confirm.
Most disturbing for members of Barak's Labor party was last week's Gallup poll, published in the Yediot Aharonot newspaper, which gave Peres a better chance than Barak of beating Sharon, edging him out by 49% of voter intentions to 44%.
Moreover, the same poll showed that 62% of those who said they would cast their vote for Barak, also said they would like him to step aside in favor of Peres.
But Likud seemed confident that even if Peres does run in Barak's stead, he would also lose.
Sharon's foreign policy advisor Zalman Shoval said Wednesday that if Peres runs, "he will be the same Mr. Peres, and he will have to come on the ticket of his policies: Oslo, the New Middle East, his supposedly valid agreement with Arafat to stop violence and so on".
In December, Barak prevented Peres from running, arguing it could divide the Labor party and therefore facilitate Sharon's election.
Barak's supporters played on Peres' reputation as an "eternal loser," pointing out that he always led in the opinion polls, and then systematically lost the elections. A co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in sealing the 1993 Oslo peace accords, Peres has been prime minister twice but never won an election.
But even Shoval admitted that, "most Israeli voters today want to see men of experience, whether it is Sharon or perhaps Peres."
But he added that Peres was identified with failed policies and would therefore lose to Sharon.
|
