The Labor Party will not support any attempt by the Likud government to call early elections if it feels the purpose of such a move is to stall the peace process, Shimon Peres, the party’s chairman, said Wednesday.
There has been talk lately in Likud circles of calling elections for next spring, rather than in October 1992, when they are currently scheduled to take place.
Addressing a meeting of his party’s central committee, Peres warned that such plans would run into solid resistance from Labor if it felt the tactic was Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s way of deferring the need to negotiate and reach compromise agreements with the Palestinians and the Arab states.
Without votes from the opposition parties, Shamir might find it hard to push an early elections bill through the Knesset, since some parties in his coalition might not support it either, for their own reasons.
LEVY OPPOSED TO EARLY ELECTIONS
But Peres reiterated Labor’s pledge to back the government in its decision to participate in the peace conference the United States and Soviet Union are hoping to convene in October.
He said if Shamir’s coalition lacked the votes in the Knesset to defeat a no-confidence motion on the peace process. Labor would supply them, as it did during a Knesset vote on the 1978 Camp David accords.
Within the Likud bloc, Foreign Minister David Levy has excoriated unnamed officials in Shamir’s office who have been quoted favoring early elections.
Levy, who has emerged as the right-wing party’s leading moderate, said Likud’s success in reaching peace negotiations on terms agreed to by the United States should mean that the party can continue governing the country until the statutory end of the Knesset’s present term.
Shamir himself has repeatedly said he favors elections at their set date, as a matter of principle, and is not looking to advance them. But political pundits say nervousness in the far-right factions of his coalition could deprive him of his governing majority.
They argue, too, that the Likud may well wish to translate its perceived success in reaching peace talks into a ballot-box contest with the divided and dispirited Labor Party.
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