Posters favour `peace leader' Sharon

Polling stage 484 is in a school on Jerusalem's Hebron Road. Head out from the city centre and it's on your right

Polling stage 484 is in a school on Jerusalem's Hebron Road. Head out from the city centre and it's on your right. Miss it and keep going for another 10 minutes, and you hit the Bethlehem roadblock and the start of Palestinian controlled territory.

All along the main road, the election posters are pushing Ariel Sharon - described in foot-high letters either as the man who'll "preserve Jerusalem" or "the leader for peace". Election posters are banned from the polling stations but there's no law to prevent the owner of the adjacent grocery store from flying them: they're stuck to his walls, his counter, the cars parked at the roadside, even his dustbin. All Sharon, of course.

This is a working-class area of traditionally right-wing Jerusalem, but Ehud Barak didn't do too badly here last time. Russian and Ethiopian immigrants live nearby, and many gave moderation a chance.

Not this time. A family of four Ethiopians walk past the grocery toward the school to vote. They've come from Givat Hamatos, a damp caravan site on a hilltop further down the same road, in which the last remnants of 1991's Ethiopian immigration wave are still living, awaiting oft-promised government housing. They probably believed that Mr Barak would move them out, and into something better. He didn't. They are voting Sharon this time.

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Now two elderly Russian-speaking women arrive. They confer briefly, and then they, too, accept the proferred Sharon ballot slip.

As for an Arab taxi driver dropping off a client, he voted for Barak last time, but today he's only driving, not voting at all. "Hey, everybody hates me," he says mildly. "The Jews hate me because I'm an Arab. The Arabs hate me because I live in Israeli-controlled Jerusalem, and I get Israeli [health and social] benefits."

At Polling Station 484, it seems, Mr Barak has lost the Ethiopians, the Russians and the Arabs. And there's no way to win an election without them.

As the taxi drives off, a gust of mid-morning wind rips one of the Sharon posters off the grocery wall and onto the pavement. No matter, the owner is already unfurling a pristine replacement.