Slim victory for Kadima in Israel

JERUSALEM -- Israeli voters dealt their leaders a series of surprises in parliamentary elections yesterday, the most crucial a slimmer mandate than expected for the newly founded Kadima party and its plans to pull out of much of the West Bank with or without a peace deal.

Voters gave the centrist Kadima at least 28 seats in the 120-member Knesset, gutted the right-wing Likud party, and appeared to hand the third-largest share of the vote to a secular nationalist party led by a Russian-speaking immigrant, results from 99 percent of the polling stations showed.

A little-known pensioners' party, which in previous elections has failed to win a single seat, is expected to debut with seven seats after a protest vote from young Israelis disillusioned with the major parties catapulted it ahead of several better-established competitors.

The political upheaval came in an election that asked voters to weigh in on some of the most important issues to dominate a campaign in years -- including the fate of the West Bank, which Israel has occupied for 39 years -- yet drew the lowest turnout for a parliamentary vote in the country's history.

Still, the results appeared to seal a major realignment of the political map.

Kadima's victory alone would mean the end of an era in Israeli politics, the first time since the nation was founded in 1948 that neither the right-leaning Likud nor socialist-rooted Labor -- or its precursor -- has led the country. Labor was on track to win 20 seats, making it the second-largest party and Kadima's most likely coalition partner.

The next question is how aggressively, and with what coalition partners, Kadima can carry out its bold plan to draw the final borders of the Jewish state within the next four years even without a peace deal -- by giving up much of the West Bank but keeping large West Bank settlement blocks clustered around Jerusalem where roughly 180,000 Israelis live.

Kadima's leader, Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, declared victory early today and said he was confident that the party would be able to move forward with its plan.

''For thousands of years we have carried the dream of Greater Israel in our hearts," said Olmert, wearing a yarmulke though he usually goes bareheaded, told cheering supporters at his election headquarters. ''But, because of our recognition of the realities of the situation . . . we are prepared to compromise."

If Kadima's plan succeeds, it would end the expansion of the Jewish settler movement that sought to populate the West Bank, land the religious right has maintained was promised to Jews by God.

But that success would also indicate a consensus among Israelis that negotiations with Palestinians are likely to be fruitless and that Israel should unilaterally set its borders to enhance its security, even if that means keeping large areas Palestinians believe are crucial for their own potential state.

In a reminder that Palestinians, too, might follow a unilateral course, Palestinian legislators voted yesterday, 71-36, to approve the new Cabinet named by the militant group Hamas, which won an upset victory in January elections.

Israel's traditional right wing was in shock last night as one of the country's main TV stations flashed the headline, ''Likud Crashes."

The party that dominated right-wing politics for decades was projected to win just 11 seats, a shattering drop from the 40 seats it held until Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his allies abandoned the party last year.

''There can be no doubt that this is a very difficult hour for the Likud, a great catastrophe, the largest in the history of the party, and which will mean we will have a great deal of very profound soul-searching within the Likud," said Danny Naveh, a Likud party member of parliament.

Seizing Likud's mantle as the largest right-wing party was Russian-speaking immigrant Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beitenu, Israel is Our Home, expected to win 12 seats in the Knesset.

Sharon started the Israeli political earthquake last fall by leaving Likud to found Kadima. He broke with his longtime right-wing allies over his decision to withdraw Israeli troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip -- which he concluded was a security burden and a threat to Israel's Jewish majority -- without receiving a deal from the Palestinians in return.

Then, in January, Sharon suffered a stroke that left him in a coma -- robbing his new movement of his popular leadership. Kadima peaked in the polls shortly afterward at a projected 44 seats but has slowly dropped since then.

Some commentators said Kadima's worse-than-expected showing proved the election fell short of a referendum approving further unilateral pullouts. But others said the large number of votes going to parties without an ideological position on holding land in the West Bank -- including Lieberman's -- left Kadima with a wide range of coalition-building options.

''There is a very powerful convergence toward the center," said Gidi Greenstein, a political analyst from the Reut Institute in Tel Aviv. ''This is the political system catching up with the public with a very pragmatic consensus."

Kadima could join with Labor and other left-wing parties, with potential support of the pensioners' party and some religious parties. Or it could form a center-right coalition including Lieberman's party, which agrees with the principle of separating from Palestinians, though some on the left object to his plan to push Arab Israeli towns out of the country.

At Lieberman's headquarters, the mood was jubilant. A largely Russian-speaking crowd celebrated with vodka shots as their leader promised -- in Hebrew -- to consider all offers to join a coalition.

Lieberman promised he would not change his core positions, including skepticism about unilateral pullouts.

Many voters said they were fed up with Israel's longstanding ideological divide between the left's vision of trading occupied land for peace with the Palestinians and the right's determination to build that land into a Greater Israel.

That fatigue prompted many voters to choose the middle path of Kadima. But it left others confused, disinterested, or attracted to small, single-issue parties.

Maya Halfgot, a 26-year-old who wore pink aviator sunglasses and a belly-baring shirt to her polling station in the West Bank settlement of Maale Adumim, voted for the GIL party, dedicated to the interests of retirees -- a choice she described as a protest against all the major parties.

''I don't believe in any of them. In these elections, it's a choice among evils," she said. ''If Sharon hadn't fallen ill I would have voted for Sharon."

Even some who didn't support Kadima said they agreed at heart that divisions between right and left are obsolete.

''Ten years ago, I would have said we shouldn't give up an inch of land," said Eli Verdi, 41, a cigar shop owner and self-professed right-winger who said he would vote Likud but only to keep the Knesset balanced among three major parties. ''Now I say take the land and leave me alone."

At the pensioners' party, the atmosphere included a bit of bewilderment.

Suddenly peppered with questions about his positions on the West Bank, Elhanan Glazer, who as the No. 6 candidate never expected to be in parliament, said, ''We'll stick with whoever is best for the pensioners."

Thanassis Cambanis of the Globe staff contributed to this report.