Israel: At the weekly Israeli government cabinet meeting yesterday, the tan leather seat usually occupied by Ariel Sharon was left empty as a token of respect to the stricken leader.
Sitting to the right of the vacant chair was Ehud Olmert, Sharon's deputy and Israel's interim prime minister, who has been propelled into the political limelight.
If the ailing ex-general does not recover, as appears increasingly likely, Mr Olmert is expected to lead Sharon's new centrist Kadima party into the March 28th elections, and is also seen as a strong contender for the premiership.
The 60-year-old career politician faces formidable challenges in maintaining unity in the embryonic Kadima, a diverse gathering of politicians of different political shades linked primarily by their loyalty to Sharon, who will be vigorously jostling for position on the parliamentary candidate list yet to be drawn up.
Sharon formed the Kadima (Hebrew for Forward) just six weeks ago after audaciously breaking with his ruling right-wing Likud in the face of obstruction from ultra-nationalist ideologues opposed to his Gaza pull-out last summer.
While polls since Mr Sharon's health crisis show Kadima still on course to head any future coalition government, analysts expect the party will lose some momentum in the absence of its creator and driving force.
Mr Olmert, a long-time ally of Sharon in the hardline Likud Party, is a shrewd (some say sly) and seasoned political operator, but his leadership is largely untested. Crucially, he lacks the hard military aura of Sharon, a trait Israeli voters seem to crave in leaders. Like Sharon, Olmert has undergone a political transformation, from backing Israeli control of all of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, through voracious settlement expansion, to helping Sharon lead the unilateral withdrawal from occupied Gaza last summer, outside of the framework of peace talks.
Indeed, Mr Olmert is credited with preceding Sharon in his belated conversion to the view that Israel needed to end the occupation of most of the Palestinian territories if it was to retain a demographic majority and ensure the Jewish character of the state.
Mr Olmert was born in the northern Israeli town of Binyamina in 1945 and trained as a lawyer before following his father into the Knesset in 1973, aged 28.
He served several ministerial terms with Likud and was the elected mayor of Jerusalem from 1993 to 2003. After unsuccessfully challenging Sharon for the Likud leadership in 1999, the two men became increasingly close, with Mr Olmert in recent years considered the prime minister's most loyal ally and point man, often floating proposals in public that later became policy.
In 2003, he left Jerusalem city hall to serve in Sharon's second government, recently taking over as finance minister. Married with four children, he lives in Jerusalem and is known to be a die-hard fan of the Beitar Jerusalem soccer team.