ISRAEL:Embroiled in a scandal, Ehud Olmert's allies have begun to turn on him, writes Peter Hirschbergin Jerusalem.
IT MAY take weeks, possibly several months, but Ehud Olmert's slide into political oblivion now seems irreversible.
Dogged by a corruption scandal, the embattled prime minister's political allies have begun turning on him. The giddy scent of elections is in the air: November is being bandied about in political circles as a likely date for when Israelis will be going to the polls.
After Morris Talansky, an American businessman, told a Jerusalem court earlier this week that he had handed tens of thousands of dollars in cash-stuffed envelopes to Olmert, before he became prime minister, in part to finance his expensive tastes, defence minister and Labour Party leader Ehud Barak called on the prime minister to step down or face early elections.
Foreign minister Tzipi Livni, the number two in Olmert's ruling Kadima party, tightened the screw on the prime minister when she called for her party to hold primaries to elect a new leader and to start preparing for an election.
Olmert, who has denied using the money for personal expenses, has contemptuously dismissed the calls for him to quit. He has said he will only resign if indicted. But the pace of political events appears to be overtaking the legal process.
Critically, Olmert has lost public trust. An opinion poll conducted earlier this week found that 70 per cent of the public did not believe his version that the money he received from Talansky went only to cover election campaign debts. Another poll published yesterday found the prime minister's approval rating was a catastrophic 14 per cent.
There was rare agreement across the political spectrum this week that the absence of public trust in the prime minister would make it impossible for him to govern. Any decision he made, whether to launch a military operation in Gaza or make concessions in peace talks with Syria, would be viewed as tainted - as a desperate effort to save his political hide.
"We would prefer a stable government, but it looks like we're headed for elections in November," Labour cabinet minister Isaac Herzog said earlier this week.
With the centre-right Likud party of Benjamin Netanyahu consistently beating Labour in opinion polls, Barak would prefer not to go to elections, but rather that Kadima would force Olmert out and elect a new leader, who could then try reconstituting a Kadima-Labour government. Opinion polls show that the popular Livni would handily win a leadership battle in the ruling party.
But the scenario of a Livni-led government in this parliament looks increasingly unlikely, especially with the ultra-Orthodox Shas party - a pivotal element in such a coalition - signalling that it is unlikely to join a reworked government. Shas leader Eli Yishai said that an "election dynamic" was already beginning to develop in parliament and that he did "not see a chance" to set up a new government. For now, Olmert, a wily political operator and veteran of numerous political scraps, is refusing to fade meekily into political obscurity.
He has asked his party to wait until Talansky has been cross-questioned - his lawyers have requested that the cross-questioning be brought forward from mid-July to mid-June - before deciding to hold leadership primaries. But the odds are stacked heavily against the prime minister. History isn't on his side either.
If Israelis do go to the polls in November, it will be the sixth time they have done so in just 12 years. In that time, only one prime minister, Ariel Sharon, has ever been re-elected.
But it is not only Israeli leaders who have fallen victim to the country's notoriously unstable political system. Peace efforts have also suffered and they are likely to suffer again. With Olmert politically paralysed and elections beckoning, a year-end deadline for an agreement with the Palestinians no longer seems realistic.
Nor do the chances of progress in talks with Syria, which Olmert announced just last week were being renewed after an eight-year hiatus.