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June 4, 2004/Sivan 15 5764, Vol. 56, No. 37
Barak planning comeback
LESLIE SUSSER
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
JERUSALEM - With the Likud Party threatening to tear itself apart over Ariel Sharon's "disengagement" plan and pundits predicting new elections, new coalitions and even new political alignments, the opposition Labor Party should have a field day.
But the chaos in Likud is highlighting Labor's biggest problem: The lack of a credible candidate for prime minister.
Labor's caretaker leader, Shimon Peres, will turn 81 in August and generally is con-sidered too old to be prime minister. None of the lumin-aries around him seems an obvious choice to lead the party.
That could set the stage for the re-emergence of former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Despite what is seen as his colossal failure as prime minister from 1999 to 2001, and his subsequent retirement from politics, Labor's leadership vacuum has led Barak to consider a political comeback.
But it won't be easy: There is a groundswell of resentment against Barak in the party and in the general public.
Still, more and more Labor people are saying that Barak at least showed leadership in office - and, they add, there's no one else.
"You'll come back," Knesset member Eitan Cabel reportedly told Barak, "not because you were so great, but because there is a leadership drought."
Barak has been toying with the comeback idea for months. After losing by a landslide to Sharon in February 2001 elections, he took what he described as a "time-out" from politics - intimating he would be back.
Last October, Barak declared that he would "announce his plans after the High Holidays." At the time, conditions for a dramatic return seemed good: The peace process was stymied by the collapse of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas' government, and Sharon seemed uncertain where to go next.
Barak proposed unilateral disengagement and withd-rawal behind a security fence, with a plan for peacemaking with the Palestinians when they were ready.
That might have been an excellent ticket for a comeback - but, at much the same time, Sharon and his deputy, Ehud Olmert, came out with a disengagement plan of their own.
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