ISRAEL: Only a month ago the ruling Likud party looked to be gliding, almost effortlessly, to a crushing victory in Israel's general election on January 28th. But a vote-buying scandal has since racked the centre-right party, which is now haemorrhaging support, with opinion polls in the last two days showing it has lost up to 10 seats in just three weeks.
A poll published in the Ha'aretz newspaper on Thursday showed the Likud winning 31 seats in the 120-seat parliament, down from 35 last week and 41 two weeks before that. Another survey, published yesterday in Yediot Aharonot, gave Likud 32 seats - a drop of 15 per cent from three weeks ago.
Police believe they now have sufficient evidence to bring about the indictment of several Likud activists and one of the party's deputy ministers, and these findings are being handed over to the state prosecutor's office. In a related but more minor scandal, police also said they had evidence to indict a Labour parliamentarian over a bribe he is said to have offered in his party's primary.
The allegations of vote-buying relate to the Likud primaries in which the party's list for the elections is determined. They emerged shortly after the vote on December 8th, when a number of candidates who failed to win electable slots on the party roster went public with stories of how they had been approached by several members of the party's 2,900-strong Central Committee, which elects the list for parliament, who offered them their votes for money.
Since the police launched a criminal investigation in mid-December, Likud activists have been parading in and out of the fraud squad headquarters near Tel Aviv. The Likud has also been damaged by revelations that figures connected to Israel's underworld were elected to the Central Committee, raising fears that the party and its parliamentary list have been penetrated by organised crime.
The most senior Likud figure to have been questioned so far by police is deputy minister, Ms Naomi Blumenthal, placed an impressive ninth in the party primary. She is suspected of having paid for several rooms at a hotel where some Central Committee members stayed the night before the primary, and of handing out other generous gifts.
In an attempt at damage control, the Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, said he would take measures against any Likud member on the party list found to be involved in the vote scandal. When it emerged earlier this week that Ms Blumenthal had refused to co-operate with her police interrogators, the prime minister fired her from her post as deputy minister. In a letter to Ms Blumenthal, Mr Sharon wrote: "Refusing to respond to police questions . . . is an intolerable and inappropriate act" for a public figure.
But Mr Sharon's effort to portray himself as unwilling to countenance any wrongdoing in his party has so far failed to stem the Likud's decline in the polls. The slide could continue, especially if the prime minister's son, Mr Omri Sharon, who won a place on the party list, is forced to pay a visit to the police over the vote-buying scandal - not an entirely implausible scenario.
Even with a precipitous 10-seat dip in the polls, however, Mr Sharon is still on course to win a second term as prime minister. The centre-left Labour Party, still reeling from the collapse of the peace process, has been unable to garner more than 22 seats in the polls, and the most recent surveys show the right-wing bloc headed by Mr Sharon winning a three- or four-seat majority.