Mr Olmert, however, brought the right-wing nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party into his coalition last autumn, which shields the government from collapse but also blocks serious pro-peace moves.
Things may be better than last autumn when there was an imminent threat of a financial collapse but the recovery is built on very short-term foundations.
The rally may well have been driven by a lifting of the intense economic gloom that enveloped the markets in the autumn of 2011 and a sense that the European authorities had removed the immediate threat of a banking collapse, while simultaneously halting the rapid rise in Italian and Spanish government-bond yields.