Process of Trying to Form a New Government Gets off the Ground

Labor Party Secretary-General Haim Barlev said today that he was “cautiously optimistic ” that President Chaim Herzog would ask Labor leader Shimon Peres to try to form a new government following the formal resignation of Premier Menachem Begin last Thursday. Barlev expressed this view after a Labor delegation met with Herzog in his Jerusalem residence.

The meeting was the first in a round of constitutional talks the President must hold with the Knesset factions to consult with them before deciding which of them he is going to ask to form a new government.

This afternoon, Herzog met with a Likud delegation. He will meet with the smaller parties tomorrow and with the independent one-man Knesset factions — Mordechai Ben-Porat and Yigael Hurwitz–on Tuesday. The President intends to make his decision Tuesday night and to call in the preferred faction leader Wednesday morning, before the Succot holiday.

The widespread expectation is that Herzog will choose Likud’s newly elected leader, Premier-designate Yitzhak Shamir. The Likud delegation presented Herzog their written undertaking from the present coalition partners — totalling 64 Knesset members — that they will back a Shamir-led government.

LABOR HOPEFUL OF GETTING FIRST CRACK

Labor, however, is still hopeful that Herzog, exercising the discretion vested in him by the law at such constitutional/political junctures, will disregard this agreement between the coalition parties and give Labor — with 50 seats, the largest single faction– the first opportunity to try and form a new government.

Labor faction whip Moshe Shahal pointed out today that the agreement between Likud and its present partners is “to negotiate” a new coalition agreement, In it self it is not an agreement actually to set up a new coalition.

Shahal argued — and he is believed to have made the same argument to Herzog — that had Labor been meeting with some of the small factions over the past two weeks or so since Begin first announced that he would resign, it might also have reached a similar understanding.

Minister-Without-Portfolio Sarah Doron (Likud-Liberals), one of the Likud delegation members meeting with the President, urged Herzog to ignore Labor’s slight numerical advantage in the Knesset because that advantage was procured by the mid-term transfer of two Likud MKs — Amnon Linn and Yitzhak Peretz — over to Labor. The nation, she noted, in the 1981 election, had returned Likud as the largest Knesset faction.