Israel's President Shimon Peres asked Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on Monday to form a new government, a day after scandal-plagued Prime Minister Ehud Olmert officially stepped down. Livni, 50, a former Mossad spy who replaced Olmert as head of the centrist Kadima party in a leadership vote on Wednesday, is hoping to become Israel's second woman prime minister after Golda Meir, who served from 1969 to 1974. "After consultations with the political parties, the president has asked Kadima party leader Tzipi Livni to form a government", public radio quoted an official statement as saying.
Livni now has 42 days to form a governing coalition in order to avert snap elections that polls indicate would bring the right-wing Likud party of former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to power.
| Livni on Monday urged the leader of the right-wing Likud party, Benjamin Netanyahu, to join a unity government. She said she would call a parliamentary election if she did not succeed in securing support for a new government. |
Traditionally, the task of forming a government goes to the party with the most seats in the Knesset, in this case Kadima, which has 29 MPs in the 120-member parliament. Livni has already begun talks with parliamentary factions that could be included in a future coalition, while at the same time pressing members of her own party to close ranks. But in the rough and tumble of shifting allegiances in Israeli politics, there is no guarantee that she will be able to come up with the numbers to form a coalition government and thus avoid an early election.
The Labor party, the main partner in the current coalition, has sent mixed signals, having met Netanyahu over weekend and called for either early elections or a "national emergency government." Livni met Labor chief Defense Minister Ehud Barak hours after Olmert formally submitted his resignation and offered to make the party a "full partner" in a new coalition, according to Haaretz newspaper, quoting unnamed Livni aides.