There may be more than 30 parties in the running, but with just over a week before Israel's parliamentary election, the race has come down to two.
"It's between Bibi and me," a determined Tzipi Livni, leader of Israel's governing Kadima party, told 600 university students Sunday in this southern desert city. Her reference was to Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the opposition Likud party.
"We're within touching distance," she said, defiantly.
While a lot of people had given up on anybody beating Netanyahu in the Feb. 10 general election, public-opinion surveys show that Livni, Israel's current foreign minister, has reason for hope.
A Dialog poll published in Friday's Haaretz newspaper showed Kadima winning 25 of the Knesset's 120 seats, with Netanyahu's Likud garnering 28.
More significantly, the survey shows Livni (with 47 percent) is considered better suited to be prime minister than either Netanyahu (at 41 percent) or Labor Leader Ehud Barak (at 30 percent). The large number of undecided voters are split between Kadima and Labor on the one hand, and Kadima and Likud on the other. All of which means Kadima has a good shot at the wavering voters, and candidate Livni is the best person to take that shot.
It's no surprise then that Livni appears to have the most active schedule of any of the major candidates, moving quickly from city to city to meet students, businesswomen and various other groups.
Former prime minister Netanyahu, hoping that nothing will trip up his march back to the prime minister's office, is making fewer appearances and choosing venues that put him in an almost presidential role. The almost invisible Barak, another former prime minister, appears only to be running to be defense chief again in a government formed by either Netanyahu or Livni.
At this event, Livni's straight-ahead 45-minute speech is interrupted just once by applause. Nevertheless, she holds her audience's rapt attention by delivering a sober message: The system stinks. I can fix it.
She berates the older politicians (meaning the two former prime ministers who lost office convincingly) and a cabinet system in which no one can agree and ministers change portfolios too often to be effective.
It is far from the kind of rallying cry one expects from a politician, but it wins favor with this and many other audiences who are distressed by the chaos of the Ehud Olmert years, and just a little bit worried about Netanyahu.
Noa Segev, 24, a former supporter of the smaller, dovish Meretz party, came to yesterday's meeting leaning toward voting for Livni.
"Netanyahu is too violent for me," Segev said, "and Barak is too weak."
Why had she left Meretz? "I thought it was important to vote for the one I thought would make the best prime minister," she explained. And Livni didn't disappoint her.
Curiously, when it comes to security issues, there is nothing dovish about her message. Livni will have no truck with Hamas and she thinks the recent attack on Gaza was absolutely necessary. She insists "no (Palestinian) refugee will ever return to Israel."
It's expected that in forming a coalition government, Ms. Livni would ask Meretz, along with Labor, to join the coalition.
However, such a lineup would still fall far short of the 61 seats needed to form a majority. That means that Ms. Livni would, almost certainly, have to call on either the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, or the virulently anti-Arab Yisrael Beiteinu party, to join her coalition.
The prospect of two very right-wing parties rivaling the venerable Labor party for third place, and contesting for influential roles in the next government, is the other story of this election campaign.
Shas, a predominantly Sephardic religious party, has said it will not support a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and has demanded the influential education portfolio in any government it joins, as well as lots of financial support for its religious schools and families.
Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu party is running on a pure anti-Arab agenda and won't support a two-state solution either.
Both parties are in a position to win as many as 16 seats in next week's election -- possibly more than Labor -- and either, or both, will likely be part of the next government.
Asher Arian, senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, says there are three reasons for Labor's remarkable slide in popularity: the birth of Kadima, a party that picked off Labor's right-of-center voters; a demographic shift in the country with the arrival of large numbers of more right-wing Russian voters; and a school system that, over the years, "trains for a nationalist value system, rather than a social structure."
More than the fall of Labor, this election also displays the overwhelming rise of the right in Israeli politics.
Arian attributes this largely to the traumatic effect many people felt after Israel's unilateral disengagement from Gaza in 2005. As far as most Israelis are concerned, this only led to the rise of Hamas and the rockets that fell on Israel, leading to a war Israelis didn't want.
"People are very afraid of this happening if Israel withdraws also from the West Bank," Arian explains. "It's become easier to identify with the fear of such a doomsday than with care for what happens to the Palestinians," something that motivated Israel's left in the 1990s.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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