Extremist leader will emerge as kingmaker

The nationalist Right has won a clear victory in the Israeli general election.

The electorate voted on the basis of fear of terrorism and rockets, of cynicism about prospects for peace, and of a laager-like mentality that rejects the notion that Arabs can be either loyal fellow-citizens in Israel or good neighbours in a Palestinian state.

Only in secular Tel Aviv did the centre-Left win a decisive majority of votes.

Superficially, Israel's foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, scored a success by leading her centrist Kadima party to win the largest number of parliamentary seats.

But under Israel's proportional representation system no single party has ever won an overall majority in an Israeli election. With a projected 28 seats out of 120 in the Knesset, Israel's single-chamber parliament, Ms Livni is far short of the 61-seat minimum required to form a coalition government.

And the combined forces of all her potential allies, mainly on the Left, are inadequate to enable her to do so. Her only hope would be to draw in the most striking winner of this election, Avigdor Lieberman, chief of the far-Right Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home) party.

He will command at least 15 seats, giving him the balance of power in the Knesset. In the next, crucial stage of coalition negotiations he is likely to emerge as the king (or queen) maker.

His ideological instincts should lead him to support the return to the premiership of Binyamin Netanyahu, leader of the second-largest party, the Likud. But there is bitter hostility between the two.

More opportunist than ideologue, Mr Lieberman is likely to play a cat-and-mouse game with Mr Netanyahu and Ms Livni. If Mr Lieberman is the outstanding winner of this election, the great loser is Ehud Barak, leader of the Labor party. For 29 years until 1977, Labor was Israel's natural party of government. Now, with 13 seats, it seems headed for oblivion.

Mr Netanyahu is the most likely next prime minister. Although he ran a lacklustre campaign, emerging with just 27 seats, he can count on backing from smaller religious parties and far-Rightists. Whoever emerges as prime minister, Mr Lieberman's party will almost certainly control several important ministries.

Among others, he may capture the justice ministry, where his populism could unsettle the rule of law, already fragile and threatened in Israel.

The Palestinian Hamas regime in Gaza will thus probably face its mirror image, an extremist religio-nationalist Israeli government in Jerusalem.

This is discouraging news for the Obama administration, which had hoped to infuse new energy into Palestinian-Israeli negotiations.

And it is disappointing for those who hoped that an Israeli-Palestinian settlement might apply a healing balm to embittered relations between the Muslim world and the West.