MIDDLE EAST/FILE: Former opposition leader Tzipi Livni expected to announce her candidacy in January's general election - PROFILE

Record ID: 859372

  • Title: MIDDLE EAST/FILE: Former opposition leader Tzipi Livni expected to announce her candidacy in January's general election - PROFILE
  • Date: 27th November 2012
  • Summary: JERUSALEM (FILE MARCH 2003) (ORIGINALLY 4:3) (REUTERS) FORMER PRIME MINISTER ARIEL SHARON HANDING OVER ABSORPTION MINISTRY TO TZIPI LIVNI CLOSE OF LIVNI
  • Embargoed: 12th December 2012 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Jerusalem, Israel, West bank
  • City:
  • Country: Israel
  • Topics: International Relations,Politics,People
  • Reuters ID: LVAZFTVZZC34IROOJLM9YOW8MON
  • Aspect Ratio:
  • Story Text: Former Israeli foreign minister and opposition leader, Tzipi Livni is widely expected to announce her candidacy on Tuesday (November 27), In Israel's fast approaching general election in January.
    According to local media, Livni delayed the launching of a new political party called 'The Movement', until after hostilities with Hamas in Gaza had ceased.
    Livni has called a news conference for 1000GMT on Tuesday, where she is expected announce the new centre-left political party she will be heading.
    Tzipi Livni, Israel's soft-spoken peace negotiator with the Palestinians, will have to prove her toughness and political saavy quickly in the upcoming elections.
    She is maybe close to becoming Israel's second woman prime minister in a country where Golda Meir was once admiringly called the only man in the cabinet, Livni must fight in the political trenches for a coalition government to lead.
    Failure to forge partnership deals and a parliamentary majority would result in a new election, a contest that opinion polls show tough-talking right-winger Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party would win.
    As Israel's foreign minister, Livni, 50, led its peace talks with the Palestinians -- U.S.-sponsored negotiations that have so far failed to produce an accord that Washington had hoped to achieve by the end of this year.
    She came to politics just over a decade ago, following a stint in the Mossad intelligence service -- as a legal adviser, some say, while others speculate that she helped hunt Arab enemies abroad -- and then a career as a corporate attorney.
    Dubbed "Mrs Clean" by one Israeli newspaper columnist, the usually dour foreign minister is widely seen as the antithesis of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, a glad-handing veteran politician embroiled in a corruption scandal forcing him from office.
    Other commentators have described her as a product of a well-oiled political machine powered by associates of her businessman-husband and question whether she will bring much change.
    Livni first had a public falling out with Olmert more than a year ago, calling for his resignation after a commission roundly criticised his handling of the 2006 war against Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrillas.
    He refused, yet Livni stayed in the government in an uneasy partnership with him. As Olmert's deputy, she sits at his side at the cabinet table and serves as his chief negotiator in peace talks with the Palestinians.
    After Livni won in Kadima primary elections in October 2008, Israeli President Shimon Peres assigned her with the mission of founding a new government, but she could not form a coalition and general elections were scheduled to February 10, 2009.
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