There are eight days left until the Likud primaries. I'll try to briefly explain what's going on.

The head of the party, who is by definition number 1 on the Knesset list is chosen by all paid members of the party, of which there are about 130,000. This vote took place a couple of weeks ago and Bibi won with 44% of the vote. Had he received less tha 40%, he'd have faced a runoff with Sylvain Shalom, who came in second. Moshe Feiglin took 12.4% of the vote. For what it's worth, in My Little Town, the vote was Feiglin-169, Bibi-102, Shalom-4.

The rest of the party list is chosen by the Central Committee members, of which there about 3000. Each CC member chooses 15 names off a list of somewhere over 100 candidates. The candidates are ranked from 2 to 18 in order of the number of votes each received. The slots from 19 down to where-it-don't-matter are reserved for the highest vote getter in a variety of sectors. For example, the highest "Tel Aviv" vote getter gets the 19 slot, the highest "Moshavim" candidate gets the 23 slot, and so forth. Current and former MKs are not eligible for the sector seats so that only 18 of these have a shot at getting in. There are 25 current Likud MKs (plus Natan Sharansky who is not currently an MK but was one) who have not defected to Kadima so 8 of them are cooked. Who will they be?

There are several of them who snuck in on the sector seats last time and are obvious losers with little real support. These are Ben-Lulu, Gavrieli, Gorlovsky and Hazan. (Note that this list is unrelated to pro/con disengagement: Hazan and Gorlovsky were anti-disengagement, Ben-Lulu waivered and Gavrieli supported it but is too big an idiot to even squeeze into Kadima.) David Levy is totally washed out and a likely loser. Leah Ness, Gila Gamliel and Haim Katz are very iffy. Ness snuck in last time on one of the women's slots but had little impact; Gamliel actually did well last time and is high profile but, despite generally opposing disengagement, she rather inelegantly supported Sharon on some critical votes in exchange for a short-lived stint as a deputy minister; Haim Katz controls a block of Israel Aircraft union people which he is attempting to parlay into a slot but is otherwise uninteresting.

If the above 8 names are indeed the losers, the world will not be a worse place when we wake up next Friday. On the other hand, the four smartest returning candidates -- Sharansky, Yuli Edelstein, Miki Eitan and Yuval Shteinitz -- do face some risk. The first two because many CC members will vote for one ex-Prisoner of Zion but not two, and the latter two because they supported disengagement. This is a pity because Eitan and Shteinitz were actually the two most effective MKs in minimizing the damage of the disengagement. Shteinitz single-handedly defeated Sharon's insane idea of bringing thousands of heavily armed Egyptian troops into Sinai and Eitan has led the battles for the civil and economic rights of those expelled from Azza. They aslo are excellent parliamentarians who will bring more credit to the party than some of the bozos on the list.

One name I didn't mention among candidates for the top 18 seats is Moshe Feiglin and herein lies a tale. There are 120 CC members affiliated with Feiglin and about 400 who support him. Now the rules of the game are simple. Let's be conservative and say that Feiglin can deliver 100 votes to any candidate he decides he likes. Assuming that each of the 100 will use one of their 15 names for Feiglin and one for his partner, Michael Fuah (who is running for the Moshavim slot at 23), this leaves room for 13 different candidates to whom Feiglin can promise 100 votes each in exchange for them promising Feiglin and Fuah the support of their people. (Admittedly, there are some constraints here: most candidates don't have such big armies to promise and the number of credible candidates is small in any case.) This ought to have been enough to drive Feiglin and Fuah right up to the top of the list. But that's not how it has played out. In fact, Feiglin dropped out of the race for lack of any realistic chance of getting one of the top 18 slots and Fuah is trailing for the Moshavim slot against a non-entity named Danny Danon.

How did this happen? To make a long story short, Feiglin refused to drop out of the race for head of the party, when doing so would have guaranteed Bibi's victory over Sylvain Shalom. (Of course, in hindsight it didn't matter but this was not clear at the time.) His reasoning was that
1. He cared more about establishing himself as a potential head of the party than getting into the Knesset.
2. If he'd have forced a runoff between Bibi and Sylvain, he'd have been able to extract big promises from Bibi in exchange for his support in the runoff.

But, as everybody with a brain asked, what if as a result of Feiglin's candidacy, Sylvain had actually won? (Not to belabor the point, Sylvain is a complete gornisht whose only "asset" is a wife who's rich enough to be vulgar and shameless and who would have destroyed the Likud and the country.) To this Feiglin and Fuah made quite clear that they really didn't give a damn. There is no hierarchy of virtue: all those who are not one-of-us are the selbe dreck. This is the kind of lunacy that I hear from my friends and neighbors every day, except that none of them is actually presuming to run the country. Suffice it to say, it did not go over well in the Likud, which has always been of a more -- let me use a generous word -- "pragmatic" mindset. Now nobody of any consequence is prepared to cut a deal with Feiglin and Fuah. As Yogi might say, they have truly snatched defeat from the clutches of victory.