ISRAEL: Sharon is the first Israeli prime minister to be re-elected in 15 years, but all is not well with Likud, writes David Horovitz
It has to be a political first: a prime minister who has just won re-election and doubled his party's representation in parliament, arrives to deliver his victory speech to the faithful soon after his opponent has called him to concede defeat. And he gets heckled.
That is what happened to Israel's Ariel Sharon in the small hours yesterday. Having secured a resounding general election victory for his Likud party, with a highly personalised campaign, the 74-year-old ex-general, the first prime minister to win re-election here in 15 years, stood at the microphone in his moment of triumph and found himself repeatedly interrupted by unhappy Likud activists.
A victory which he took pains not to tout as particularly sweet - given the relentless toll of victims in the ongoing 28-month conflict with the Palestinians - quickly turned downright sour.
This public evidence of internal Likud, just hours after the polling booths had closed in elections for Israel's 16th Knesset, highlights a conflict which is bound to influence the stability and policies of the coalition government Mr Sharon has now begun assembling.
With no little justification, Mr Sharon sees the trouncing of the opposition Labor party and the overall decimation of the Israeli left in these elections as a vindication of his policies that, however the rest of the world regards them, are evidently seen by most Israelis as relatively centrist and consensual.
As he asserted in that heckler-punctuated victory speech, the public had returned him to office because of his statesman-like stewardship of Israel, in appreciation of the vital alliance he had forged with President Bush, in recognition of his savvy acceptance in principle of limited, unthreatening Palestinian independence.
Characterising his victory as an unmistakable mandate for a continuation of such policies, Mr Sharon is calling on Labor, on the centrist Shinui and on all other "Zionist parties" to join him in the same kind of "unity coalition" which he has headed these past two years.
Inside his own massively strengthened Likud, by contrast, Tuesday's success constitutes a public mandate for something quite different: a "narrow coalition" comprising the Likud and other rightist and religious parties, with Labor firmly outside the fence and Shinui barely tolerated.
Tsachi Hanegbi, the minister of environment who came top when Likud activists met two months ago to choose their list of incoming Knesset members, flatly asserts that the electorate has voted for a "nationalist government", excluding Labor and other factions he would regard as political softies.
Mr Hanegbi is not in the minority here, Mr Sharon is. Not one of the Likud's leading 10 incoming MKs endorses the prime minister's grudging support for Palestinian statehood. Last year, indeed, the party leadership passed a resolution outlawing a Palestinian state anywhere between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea.
So when Mr Sharon from the podium chose only to quote from Labor's assassinated leader Yitzhak Rabin on the need for national unity and not to cite any stirring comments from his Likud prime ministerial predecessors, and when he then exacerbated that crime with his own unity plea, some of the Likud faithful erupted in protest cries of: "We don't want unity."
Others more tellingly broke out with a chant of "Hail Bibi" - in praise of Mr Sharon's rival/foreign minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu. Sitting discomfited on the platform, Mr Netanyahu had to admonish his supporters, with a shake of the head and a raised finger, that this was not the time or place.
A seasoned and wily campaigner, Mr Sharon is acutely conscious of how much better his next government's international standing will be - its relationship with the Arab world, Europe and, vitally, the United States - if he stands at the centre of a coalition comprising both right and left elements, rather than at the moderate edge of a right-religious alliance.
In this, he faces an uphill battle over the month and a half or so the law allows him to weld together a firm Knesset majority.
The National Union faction, to the right of the Likud, will likely insist on government guidelines providing for increased funding for Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the deportation of the Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat - demands which would bring the government into direct confrontation with the US and the rest of the international community.
For now, on the other side of the spectrum, Labor says it will not sit in the cabinet as Mr Sharon's leftist "fig leaf" and Shinui professes a refusal to join if Labor doesn't.
Some of Mr Sharon hardest battles on the way to a new coalition - and even after it is established - will be those he has to fight with his Likud party. A sour victory, indeed.