By James Reynolds BBC Jerusalem correspondent

Amram Mitzna, the mayor of Haifa, is the new leader of Israel's Labour Party.

He will lead the party into the country's general election to be held at the end of January.

Getting elected head of the party was the easy bit - opinion polls always suggested that Mr Mitzna would win the Labour leadership by a comfortable margin.

Now he has to move on to the hard part and the real contest - Israel's general election. And for now almost no-one here thinks he can win.

More than two years of violence have left Israel in a right-wing mood and that favours the current prime minister, Ariel Sharon.

Open doubts

The national mood favours Mr Sharon

Labour Party officials admit in private, and even in public, that their party stands little chance of winning back power in this coming election.

But still Labour's new leader will campaign in the hope that the country's mood may change and that a new face in national politics may just make the difference.

Mr Mitzna's platform offers a clear contrast to Mr Sharon's.

Mr Mitzna says he is in favour of restarting peace talks with the Palestinians, no matter who their leader is.

And he says that if talks fail, he will remove Jewish settlements from many parts of the West Bank and then build a security wall to divide Israel from Palestinian lands - a policy known here as "unilateral separation".

Mr Mitzna now has two months in which to persuade the Israeli public that his ideas are worth betting on at the ballot box.