Ariel Sharon’s doctors plan to start bringing the Israeli prime minister out of his medically induced coma this morning to assess the extent of the damage to his brain caused by a stroke last week.
Sharon’s doctors say there is almost no chance that he will be fit enough to return to work and a formal assessment to that effect would oblige the attorney general, Menachem Mazuz, to declare the prime minister unfit for office and require the Cabinet to elect a successor.
That is almost certain to be the man now serving as acting prime minister, Ehud Olmert, after other potential challengers, including the former prime minister Shimon Peres, threw their support behind him on Sunday.
The director of the Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem, Shlomo Mor-Yosef, said doctors would begin reducing the sedatives administered to Sharon provided there was no change in his condition overnight. ”We have been waiting for this since Wednesday — to know how the prime minister’s brain is functioning,” he said.
Doctors say the damage could range from some impairment to physical and mental functioning, to spending the rest of his life in a permanent vegetative state.
Sharon’s neurosurgeon, Jose Cohen, said the chances the prime minister would survive were ”very high” but he had suffered some cognitive damage. ”He will not continue to be prime minister, but maybe he will be able to understand and to speak.”
Mor-Yosef was more cautious, saying a brain scan on Sunday showed the swelling had reduced but doctors were still working to save Sharon. ”I can’t yet say that the prime minister is out of danger, but there are slight signs of an improvement. We are fighting to save his life.”
The Cabinet is expected to confirm that Olmert will head the government until general elections in March. That will move Israeli politics out of the limbo in which electioneering has been suspended out of respect for Sharon, and towards reconstructing the leadership of the new party he founded late last year, Kadima.
At the opening of the weekly Cabinet meeting on Sunday, Olmert sought to reassure Israelis that there would be continuity. ”If I could speak with him this morning and ask, ‘Arik [Sharon], what would you tell us? What would you want us to do?,’ he would say, ‘I appreciate the fact that you are all concerned about my health. Thank you, but get to work. You must continue running affairs of state and doing everything to take care of security and socioeconomic issues.’ And this is what we will continue to do.”
Later, Olmert said he prayed that his tenure as acting prime minister would be short and Sharon would return as leader. But few Israelis now expect that and the interest in Sharon’s condition appears mostly to be out of humanitarian concern.
Olmert continued to consolidate his position as the favoured successor to Sharon as leader of Kadima. Shimon Peres, the former Labour leader who threw his support behind Kadima late last year, on Sunday rebuffed attempts to lure him back to Labour and said making Olmert the acting prime minister was the right move. Other potential challengers for the Kadima leadership also said they recognised Olmert’s right to the post, at least for now.
But the acting prime minister also faces important early decisions that could signal his intent towards the Palestinians. Principally he must decide whether to allow Palestinians who live in Jerusalem to vote in the election for the Palestinian parliament at the end of this month.
Sharon had resisted it, even though Israel has agreed to such ballots under the Oslo accords, fearing that it posed a challenge to Israel’s claim to all of Jerusalem as its indivisible capital. But preventing the ballot could derail the election and draw criticism from Washington and European governments which have been pressing the Palestinians to hold the vote. – Guardian Unlimited Â