Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Thursday that he would court the opposition Labor Party and ultra-Orthodox parties in a bid to shore up his minority coalition. Sharon made the announcement a day after badly losing a Knesset vote on the budget. After the vote, Sharon dismissed the Shinui Party, his main coalition partner, which voted against the budget, leaving him with only 40 seats in the 120-member Knesset. „There is no choice but to start formally to try to widen the coalition with the Labor and the ultra-Orthodox,” Sharon told a gathering of newspaper editors. „I intend to bring this step as soon as possible for approval to the Likud Central Committee to enable the establishment of a unity government,” Sharon said in broadcast remarks. „There are two clear choices: unity government or elections,” he said. „I hope my friends will understand we have reached this point and there’s no other choice.” Sharon said that Labor Party Chairman Shimon Peres can fulfill any role in a new unity government „but, of course, the position of prime minister is not available.” If Sharon cannot patch together a new coalition, he could be forced to call new elections, threatening to delay or cancel Israel’s planned withdrawal from the Gaza Strip next year. „The disengagement will be implemented, period. I repeat, it will be implemented, period,” Sharon said Thursday. Any party that joins the governing coalition will have to support its decision to carry out the disengagement plan according to its current schedule, Sharon said. Sharon reiterated that he would be willing to coordinate aspects of the unilateral pullout with the Palestinian Authority if a new leadership that emerges after the January 9 Palestinian election „fights terror and dismantles its infrastructure”. Sharon also said that Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti would remain in jail despite his plans to run for head of the Palestinian Authority. „He can (campaign) according to the conditions in the prison in which he sits,” Sharon said. Hanegbi indicates Likud will okay Labor unity talks Likud Central Committee Chairman Tzachi Hanegbi, citing Sharon’s sacking of the five Shinui ministers for voting against the budget, indicated Thursday that the influential party body would likely reverse a previous ban and allow Sharon to open negotiations with the Labor Party toward a unity government. The budget was defeated by a vote of 69-43, with the votes in favor coming from the Likud (38 MKs) plus UTJ, which won a promise of NIS 290 million for its educational and cultural institutions in exchange for its five votes. All other parties voted against. Although Likud MKs opposed to Sharon’s disengagement plan had threatened to skip the vote, in the end, only one did so – David Levy, who has been opposing his party’s economic policy for years. The other Likud absentee, Eli Aflalo, was in the hospital. With Shinui out of the government, Sharon’s coalition numbers a mere 40 MKs -those of his own Likud Party. Thus he will have to call new elections if he cannot bring in Labor, Likud and Labor sources agreed on Wednesday night. Sharon contacted Attorney General Menachem Mazuz on Thursday morning to inform him of the appointment of Minister Tzipi Livni to take over from Shinui’s Yosef Lapid as justice minister. It is unclear whether Sharon will be able to go ahead with plans to convene the Likud Central Committee as early as next Thursday to ask that it reverse a previous decision against Labor’s entry into the government. However, he will apparently begin negotiations with Labor, as well as United Torah Judaism and Shas, even before then.
Hanegbi, referring to the previous decision, said Thursday that after the departure of Shinui, the circumstances are entirely different. A government in which the Likud would be in between the Labor Party and Shinui would have been a government in which the Likud would have turned into a minority within its own government, and therefore this was rejected by an enormous majority by the Likud Central Committee. „What the Central Committee will surely be asked to approve, is affording the prime minister the possibility of conducting negotiations and incorporating additional parties, among them the Labor Party as well as parties from our own camp.” Likud may demand Shas be included Sharon would prefer to form a coalition quickly with Labor and UTJ, leaving Shas for a later date. But several Likud ministers warned that the central committee is likely to nix a government that does not include both ultra-Orthodox parties alongside Labor, while it probably would approve a government that did. These warnings came from many of the ministers who led the opposition to Labor’s entry into the government this summer. From Sharon’s perspective, the main problem with Shas is that Labor refuses to sit with the Haredi party as long as it opposes the disengagement plan. But since Shas objects only to unilateral withdrawal and not to a negotiated agreement, it might be possible to solve this problem now that Yasser Arafat is dead by reaching an agreement with the Palestinians over the pullout. MK Haim Ramon (Labor), an enthusiastic advocate of his party’s entry into the government, predicted last night that a coalition agreement could be finalized in less than a day, as most issues had been settled during a previous round of talks earlier this year. But most Knesset sources predicted that it will take three to four weeks to form a new coalition, since Labor also needs the consent of its central committee – and not all Labor members support joining the government. Only after a new coalition is formed is the budget likely to pass its first reading. This means that the bill is very unlikely to pass its final reading by the end of the year, since the Knesset Finance Committee cannot begin working on it until it passes the first reading. If the budget does not pass by December 31, the government will have to use the 2004 budget for the first three months of 2005. Among other things, this means that no money will be available for the disengagement, which did not exist in the 2004 budget. Shortly before the vote, Shinui, which opposed the budget because of the allocation to UTJ, considered declaring the ballot a confidence vote, thereby causing the government to fall. But Labor quickly announced that it would abstain instead of voting against if Shinui went ahead with this plan. Without Labor, the opposition would lack the 61 votes needed to topple the government, thus causing Shinui to drop the idea. Throughout Wednesday, negotiations took place in an effort to obtain a majority for the budget, but it was clear from the outset that there was little chance of success. Sharon refused Shas’s offer to abstain in exchange for altering the budget’s welfare policy, concluding that he lacked a majority even with Shas abstaining, and therefore there was no point in making changes. Efforts were also made to resolve the dispute with Shinui: Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered the party some NIS 300 million in allocations for causes dear to its heart, such as higher education and culture, to compensate for UTJ’s NIS 290 million. But Shinui refused, saying it would be assuaged only by a promise to immediately enact a civil marriage law. BPI-info
