In the Labour primaries, the winner is Ehud Barak. This is no longer news, nor has it been for several months, ever since the four candidates for the position of party chairman became known.
Neither Yossi Beilin, Efraim Sneh nor Shlomo Ben-Ami have been serious rivals for the job. Most Labour voters clearly perceive Barak to be the only party member capable of beating Benjamin Netanyahu at the polling booth.
From Barak’s point of view, this is a dangerous assumption. If his potential voters have been telling themselves today that their candidate is a shoo-in, Barak may well prove, tonight, to have polled fewer votes than forecast. The high voter turnout that all the candidates ought to hope for, is more essential for Barak than for anyone else. Most stay-at-home Labourites are his potential voters. Most of the so-called "undecided’ have been wavering between him and another candidate.
As from Wednesday, Barak’s most dangerous rival is Benjamin Netanyahu. That, at least, will be the case if Barak proves capable of unifying Labour and sharing party leadership with the other contenders. If he tries to emulate, in the Labour party, Netanyahu’s autocratic rule of the Likud, Barak could find himself in the same pickle as the Prime Minister: at the apex of the political pyramid, but with no party base. Barak, I should imagine, will try to learn from Netanyahu’s mistakes.