Over the past decade, Israeli voters have rejected overwhelmingly radical political parties like Meretz.
Yossi Sarid, leader of the opposition Meretz Party, reached the same conclusion from the opposite point of departure.
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The harder-line Mr Mofaz, a hawkish former chief of staff of the army, was against an alliance with Meretz.
Many leading intellectuals, including the authors Amos Oz and David Grossman, are backing Meretz rather than Labour this time.
ECONOMIST: The party of the old establishment is dying under Ehud Barak
Its two standard bearers - Meretz and Labor - were effectively wiped out.
As for Mr Oz and the writers, they, Mr Barak indicated, have been flitting between Labour and Meretz for decades.
ECONOMIST: The party of the old establishment is dying under Ehud Barak
She wooed over many left-of-centre voters from Labour and from Meretz to put together her leading 28-seat tally for Kadima.
Others drifted to Meretz over the years, including that party's three most recent leaders: Shulamit Aloni, Yossi Sarid and Yossi Beilin.
ECONOMIST: The party of the old establishment is dying under Ehud Barak
The UPZ is the US campus representative of the Labor and Meretz parties as well as of Hashomer Hatzair and Habonim Dror.
The leader of Israel's left-wing opposition party Meretz -- Yossi Sarid -- also described Husseini as one of the "best sons" of the Palestinian people.
In any event, he calculates, Meretz would presumably support a peace agreement with the Palestinians, if one were put to the test of the Knesset.
Another poll says Meretz, a longtime left-wing party, gained seven seats.
Labour faces a pincer attack from Kadima on its right flank and from a reinvigorated Meretz, the most peace-minded of the mainstream parties, on its left.
ECONOMIST: The party of the old establishment is dying under Ehud Barak
Second, leftist voters decided that they want to be represented by a big party, so they abandoned Labor and Meretz and put their eggs in Kadima's basket.
Livni insists that Kadima is not a leftist party and that she is not a leftist even as her positions are identical to those of the post-Zionist Meretz party.
As an Israeli citizen who has voted for Meretz, one of Israel's most left-wing and pro-peace parties, for five straight elections, I assume you would place me in that hard-core category.
While our media elites endlessly drone on about whether or not Likud is sufficiently "pro-peace" to satisfy Meretz and Kadima, our national discourse is ignoring the greatest threat this country faces: missiles.
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But since Shas has 17 seats to Meretz's ten in the 120-seat Knesset, Mr Barak has resolved to pay out what Shas demands, and if Mr Sarid and his party walk, so be it.
But the departure of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, with its 17 seats, was a bitter blow, especially after Mr Barak had supported the party in its battle with another coalition ally, Meretz, over money for its religious schools.
But through the Supreme Court and the legal fraternity, their allied foreign government- funded Astroturf pressure groups, and the supportive media, the values and views advocated by Meretz have been forced down the public's throat over and over again.
Tuesday Livni took time out of her busy schedule of political meetings with Labor, Shas and Meretz leaders with whom she is attempting to build a government without being elected by anyone, to meet with Fatah's chief negotiator Ahmad Qurei.
Its peace policy is now hardly distinguishable from that of Kadima or indeed Meretz: a two-state solution based on the 1967 border, with land swaps and the retention of the bigger Jewish settlement blocks, as outlined by Mr Barak when he was prime minister from 1999-2001.
ECONOMIST: The party of the old establishment is dying under Ehud Barak
In a more immediate, though more oblique, threat to Mr Barak's political well-being, the attorney-general recently ordered the police to investigate Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual leader of the traditionalist Shas party, for publicly cursing Yossi Sarid, the education minister and leader of the secularist Meretz party.
The Centre Party had anyhow been coming apart at the seams, but Mr Barak is also having little joy from his two main coalition partners, the Sephardic- Orthodox Shas party and the leftist-secular Meretz party, which are at each other's throats over state finance for Shas schools.
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