JERUSALEM - Benjamin Netanyahu swept the race to lead Israel's hardline Likud Party, a party official said, boosting his ambitions to reclaim the country's premiership.
Netanyahu, crowned in recent polls as the front-runner for Israel's top job, faced off against far-right West Bank settler Moshe Feiglin, who would bar Arabs from Israel's parliament and favors their emigration.
A partial tally gave Netanyahu 73 per cent of the vote to Feiglin's 22 per cent, party executive director Gad Arieli said. World Likud Party Chairman Danny Danon trailed with 4 per cent.
While a Netanyahu victory had been all but assured, a strong Feiglin showing could have shored up Israel's extreme right and hurt Netanyahu's efforts to rehabilitate Likud after it was trounced in elections last year.
A telegenic politician and avowed hawk, the M.I.T.-educated Netanyahu speaks flawless, American-accented English. He's tough on defense issues and hands-off on the economy, and in recent months has been trying to position himself somewhere in the political center.
"It's clear that Netanyahu is a right-wing man, but a right-wing man who is always winking at the center," political commentator Hanan Crystal said Tuesday.
Netanyahu was expected to address Likud loyalists early Wednesday. But early in the polling, he made it clear that Tuesday's race was a dress rehearsal for a bigger contest.
"I call on Likud members to go vote because tonight, when we close the polls, we begin the race for prime minister," said Netanyahu, who has led Likud since late 2005, as he voted in Jerusalem.
Israeli general elections are scheduled for 2010, but could be earlier if Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's fractious coalition government falls apart, or if Olmert himself -- facing low poll numbers and a series of legal woes -- leaves office.
With many Israelis on summer holiday, turnout among the nearly 100,000 Likud members was slightly under 40 per cent. In an effort to encourage Likud members to vote, Netanyahu extended the polling into the night and stationed ballot boxes at hotels around the country.
Voter turnout was a key focus in the race. Though Feiglin counted on the support of only 10 percent of Likud's members, he stood to win as much as 30 per cent of the vote because of Netanyahu no-shows, Crystal said before the polls closed.
Even many settlers view Feiglin, who would pull Israel out of the United Nations, as extreme. Significant support for the far-right challenger could have tarred Likud as an extremist party and hurt Netanyahu's efforts to lure centrist voters in national election.
Likud dominated Israeli politics for nearly three decades until 2005, when party leader Ariel Sharon bolted to form the centrist Kadima, taking top Likud legislators with him. Sharon was incapacitated by a stroke in early 2006 and replaced by Olmert, another former Likud politician who led Kadima to victory in elections several months later.
Likud fell apart in that vote, shrinking to 12 seats in Israel's 120-seat parliament from 38 in the previous elections in 2003.
But Netanyahu's hawkish policies appear to have gained renewed popularity with an Israeli public frustrated by ongoing rocket fire from the Gaza Strip and angry over the country's inconclusive war against Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon last summer.
Netanyahu was a vocal opponent of Israeli-Palestinian peace deals in the early 1990s, but later, as prime minister from 1996 to 1999, he negotiated two interim peace deals and handed over most of the West Bank town of Hebron to the Palestinian Authority.
Still, his relations with the Palestinians were acrimonious and his ties with the Clinton administration, which wanted to see more Israeli flexibility, were often strained. His shaky coalition government fell apart in 1999, and he was unseated by Labor's Ehud Barak in elections that year.
After his defeat, he resigned as Likud's chairman and left politics for three years before returning as foreign minister and finance minister under Sharon. He quit the Cabinet two weeks before Israel's 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip to protest the pullout, taking Likud into the opposition.
The author of several books on terrorism and Israeli policy, Netanyahu is the son of a hardline Zionist ideologue and the brother of one of Israel's most famous war heroes -- Yoni Netanyahu, who died commanding Israel's legendary hostage rescue at Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976.
