Veteran statesman Shimon Peres was elected president of Israel on Wednesday, finally winning his first vote for top office and crowning a record-breaking career spanning more than half a century.
The sole candidate in a second-round vote held in Parliament after his rival contenders dramatically quit the race, Peres’s victory was a triumph that laid to rest the ghosts of seven years past when he famously lost the same ballot.
Elected by a landslide 86 votes to 23 in a result announced by Parliament speaker Dalia Itzik and greeted by warm applause in the chamber, Peres had been assured victory after rivals Reuven Rivlin and Colette Avital pulled out.
The 83-year-old Nobel laureate was then huddled away by his supporters, Itzik and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert without making a formal statement to the cameras.
”I am withdrawing from the race and call on all lawmakers to vote unanimously for Shimon Peres,” Rivlin, a former parliamentary speaker from the right-wing Likud party, said choking back tears before the second vote.
”Long live the president of Israel,” cried Rivlin, a hugely popular former Parliament speaker whose father also ran for but lost the vote for the presidency conducted in the 120-member Knesset.
Peres’s victory was the crowning triumph in the record-breaking career of the octogenarian, who has held just about every major office in a career with a political pedigree second to none and stretching back five decades.
Admired far more abroad than at home, supporters say his international prestige could lift the Presidency out of disgrace with two consecutive incumbents forced out by scandal, latterly Moshe Katsav accused of rape.
Peres, the two-time prime minister who has never won a national election, has said the presidency could be his last service to Israel but had been cautious about victory, saying it would take ”God’s help” to win.
In the July 2000 presidential election, Peres was widely expected to win, only to watch in shock as the then obscure Katsav, also from Likud, beat him for the prize after the surprise defection of ultra-Orthodox MPs.
Peres’s humiliating defeat — and his loss in 2005 of the Labour leadership — sealed his image as the perennial loser after failing to lead his party to victory in parliamentary elections in 1977, 1981, 1984, 1988 and 1996.
But his age and decades of public service have led many to appeal to lawmakers to grant him Israel’s highest, if largely ceremonial, public office. — AFP
