LEAD: Israel's Kadima party announces early leadership elections

Jan 18, 2012, 11:11 GMT

Tel Aviv - Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni on Wednesday announced that Kadima would hold primaries on March 27 to elect a leader to lead the centrist party into a parliamentary election next year.

More than 100,000 Kadima members will vote on whether she or another candidate will challenge Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's rightist Likud party in February 2013.

'The elections in Israel are no longer a faraway mirage and (are) beginning to come closer,' she told a news conference near Tel Aviv. 'Kadima must be ready.'

Livni's main rival is Shaul Mofaz, a former military chief of staff and defence minister and a relative hardliner in Kadima, who announced his candidacy at a separate news conference.

Polls give Mofaz only a slight lead over Livni, a former foreign minister who led negotiations with the Palestinians under the Kadima-led government of Ehud Olmert.

Those negotiations broke off in late 2008 when Olmert stepped down to face corruption charges, which prompted an early election in February 2009.

Polls predict that Kadima, which with 28 seats is the largest party in the 120-strong parliament, would fare worse in the next election with Mofaz at the helm.

Netanyahu's Likud, which won 27 seats in the 2009 election, formed a coalition government with right-wing and nationalist parties who held a narrow majority in parliament.

Polls have predicted that Kadima would lose about half the seats it currently holds in parliament in an election. It faces competition from Yair Lapid, a popular journalist who this month announced he would form his own centrist party to run in the next election.

Likud would win an equal number of seats, or emerge even stronger, if elections were held today, polls show. Likud is scheduled to hold primaries on January 13, but Netanyahu faces no strong rivals.