Word: barak
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...Ehud Barak is telling the foreign press that the elections haven't begun in earnest, and that he still believes he'll win. Answering questions about how little he's campaigning, he's adopting an "I have not yet begun to fight" posture, promising surprises and so on. Is he deluding himself, or can he still win this election...
...refusing to give up, that's for sure, at a stage when a lot of people around him have given up - if not publicly then privately. People close to Barak acknowledge it doesn't look good for him. And people in the Labor party who don't support Barak have been saying loudly for weeks that he can't beat Sharon...
...Sharon hasn't had to vilify Barak nearly as much as Barak has had to paint Sharon as an extremist. Sharon is simply campaigning on the idea that Barak would be great in any job except prime minister. A unity government could actually survive for some time, because it would suit both leaders to avoid a new election. After all, if there was a new election for both parliament and the prime minister's job, Sharon would be challenged by Netanyahu for the leadership of his party. And Barak, too, would probably face an internal challenge...
...while Barak has a low showing in the polls, Sharon isn't necessarily going to get more support than you'd expect a right-winger to get. Barak may have lost the support of many who have traditionally voted with the left, but they won't vote for Sharon; they'll simply stay home. As the substantially higher numbers for Peres show, it's not as if the whole of Israel is shifting to the right - they're simply expressing their discontent with Barak...
...things work out as Barak and Sharon probably hope, it may mean a reshuffling of the deck chairs. It could produce a unity government under Sharon that would last a while. But then that was precisely why Benjamin Netanyahu stayed out of the fray - without a new parliamentary election to change the balance of power, it's simply rearranging the deck chairs on what might still be a political Titanic...