The opposition leader, Mr Ehud Barak, appears to be pulling farther ahead of the Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, as Israel's election campaign moves towards its final fortnight, David Horovitz writes from Jerusalem. Opinion polls in both of Israel's biggest-selling newspapers yesterday placed the moderate Mr Barak 8 per cent clear of Mr Netanyahu, the hardline Likud leader, the largest margin seen so far.
As the May 17th polling day draws nearer, Mr Barak's candidacy is gathering momentum, Mr Netanyahu is struggling, and the centrist candidate, Mr Yitzhak Mordechai, is plummeting into irrelevance.
The only question now, as regards Mr Mordechai, is whether he and the two other no-hope prime ministerial wannabes - the right-winger, Mr Benny Begin, and the Arab politician, Mr Azmi Bishara - will abandon their candidacy before May 17th, or struggle on to inevitable defeat, forcing a run-off between the top two candidates, Mr Barak and Mr Netanyahu, on June 1st.
The polls are also favourable to Mr Barak as regards the likely division of seats in the 120-member Knesset. They show that the right-wing and Orthodox parties, which held a near-majority of seats in the last parliament, are losing ground, a trend that would make it easier for Mr Barak, if elected prime minister, to assemble a majority coalition.
Opinion polls in recent Israeli electoral history have consistently overestimated support for the moderate candidates, and Mr Barak is said to have been warning his colleagues against over-confidence.
However, his campaign appears to have been boosted by a surge of support among immigrants from the former Soviet Union, motivated by antipathy towards Mr Netanyahu's allies in the ultra-Orthodox, Moroccan-dominated Shas party. Under Mr Netanyahu, Shas has controlled the Interior Ministry, and immigrants seeking to register for citizenship and immigrant grants complain that they are routinely humiliated by ministry officials.