ISRAEL:ISRAELI FOREIGN minister Tzipi Livni may have a comfortable lead in the opinion polls ahead of the September 17th primary to elect a successor to prime minister Ehud Olmert in the ruling Kadima party, but senior members of her camp are edgy.
Finance minister Roni Bar-On, one of Livni's most prominent supporters, told the daily Haaretz yesterday he would have a hard time staying in the party if the leadership primary began to resemble the type of horse trading and irregularities in voter registration that had characterised his former party, the centre-right Likud.
While some polls show Livni with a double-digit lead among Kadima's 70,000 voters in the race against her main competitor, transport minister Shaul Mofaz, her supporters fear what they say is a questionable voter drive by Mofaz as well as his stronger connection to crucial field operatives could ultimately swing the race in his favour. With such a small electorate, they say, a few thousand votes could swing the result.
One of Livni's strongest cards is that she is much more popular with the general public than Mofaz, with polls showing Kadima under her stewardship winning 10 seats more than under Mofaz. Opinion surveys show the two other candidates in the race, public security minister Avi Dichter and interior minister Meir Sheetrit, struggling to get into double digits.
Livni's popularity stems from her ability to cast herself as the champion of clean politics and as an antidote to the scandal-ridden Olmert, who was forced to announce his intention to resign in the wake of allegations that he received hundreds of thousands of dollars from an American Jewish businessman. She called on him to step down after a report last year castigated the prime minister for mismanaging the war in Lebanon in 2006 and she renewed that call after the corruption allegations emerged earlier this year.
But Livni is also portraying herself as a pragmatist on the diplomatic front: as foreign minister she is responsible for leading the negotiations with the Palestinians, which are aimed at reaching a comprehensive peace agreement based on a two-state solution.
She wasn't always a proponent of territorial compromise. Livni came from a hawkish home where her parents were both members of the pre-state Irgun underground that used violent methods in fighting the British in Palestine. Moreover, her father was a former Likud member of parliament when the party was still ideologically committed to a Greater Israel.
While she began her career in the Likud, her ideological views softened over time. She finally broke with the party over its refusal to back Ariel Sharon's plan for a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 and she joined the then prime minister in setting up the breakaway, centrist Kadima party.
Mofaz, by contrast, is trying to paint himself as Mr Security. A former chief of staff and former defence minister, he has espoused more sceptical views on negotiations with the Palestinians, with his aides saying he believes it could take years before there is sufficient trust to forge an agreement.
He has also said he will not countenance an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights - Syria's condition for a peace agreement - and in early June he announced that if Iran continued building its nuclear programme, an Israeli attack would become "unavoidable".
Mofaz is trying to convince Kadima voters that he is the only candidate who has a chance of reconstituting a Kadima-led government after the primary race is over and he is hoping his hardline views will make it easier for him to bring more hawkish parties into the ruling coalition.
While Livni and Mofaz have crafted strikingly different messages, for Kadima members the choice could come down to a simple calculation. Do they support Mofaz because they believe he has the greatest chance of forming a government in the current parliament, or do they back Livni because they believe a new ruling coalition cannot be formed, that the country is therefore heading for an election and Kadima will do significantly better under her leadership?