Middle East

Polls open in legislative elections

Article published on the 2009-02-10 Latest update 2009-02-11 09:17 TU

Polling stations opened at seven am local time on Tuesday in Israel and will close at 10 pm. Correspondent Mark Lavie in Tel Aviv says turnout may be down for due to poor weather. Several parties are running buses to bring voters, particularly the elderly, to polling stations.

Over five million voters are eligible to vote in the some 9,000 polling stations.

The election was originally scheduled for next year but was brought forward after corruption allegations surrounding Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. It opens with a large portion of voters still undecided, according to surveys which estimate their number at between ten and 15 per cent.

The right-wing Likud party of Benjamin Netanyahu is thought by pollsters to be in the strongest position but is believed to have lost some ground to the centrist Kadima party of Tzipi Livni.

Correspondent Mark Lavie says a coalition government is likely, "If the leading party gets less than a third of the votes, and possibly even less than a quarter of the votes, then you have a situation where you have to set up a coalition among very powerful parties".

 

"That means that even if Benjamin Netanyahu is Prime Minister he will have to bring in other parties that are equal in size to his."

Outside of Livni's Kadima party, possible coalition members include the Labour party of Ehud Barak and the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party of Avigdor Lieberman.

"Yisrael Beiteinu believes that Israeli Arabs, that make up to 20 per cent of the population, should have to take loyalty oaths or lose their citizenship. That's not going to happen but it's a pretty extreme position, and yet it's getting a lot of traction here in Israel today, Lavie says.

He adds that a coalition "makes a very shaky situation". "No matter who's the Prime Minister in a situation like that, not very much can get done because if any policy is considered which negates the platforms or the core beliefs of any of the participants in the coalition, then that partner can threaten to pull out of the coalition and bring down the government," he says.

The possibility of a boycott of the election by Israeli Arabs is fading says Lavie, "there's an anti-boycott move afoot in the Israeli Arab community and it's likely turnout will be about the same as it is in the rest of the country".