IF ANY man could combine the twin roles of president and jailbird it is Marwan Barghouti, the Palestinian firebrand who starred in his own trial for murder as both ringmaster and defendant.

Scruffy, diminutive and languishing in a brown Israeli prison-issue boiler suit, the 45-year-old West Bank activist exuded infinitely more dynamism and populist appeal than Mahmoud Abbas, his nominal Fatah boss, who has struggled to emerge from the shadow of Yassir Arafat.

Mr Abbas and Barghouti are polar opposites: charisma without rank, against rank without charisma.

Barghouti would be the standard-bearer of the younger Palestinians — born, raised and hardened under Israeli occupation only to be pushed aside by the “Abu” generation of PLO veterans who returned from exile in Tunisia with Arafat in 1994. It is the younger generation of Fatah, particularly its militant offshoot, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, that would push hardest for a coup against the “Tunisians”, for whom they can barely conceal their contempt and against whom they have already threatened violence.

Barghouti, now serving five life sentences for murder and terrorist offences, was born in the West Bank and rose through the Fatah ranks as a student activist. His four children were all born while he was in jail, in hiding or in exile.

He was a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and a relatively junior Fatah official when the second intifada broke out in 2000 and he swiftly rose to prominence.

An effective rabble-rouser, he orchestrated demonstrations against Israeli tanks and was a ubiquitous sight at every barricade and flashpoint on the West Bank — particularly those nearest a television camera.

Arrested by Israel in May 2002 — amid persistent rumours that he was betrayed by jealous Palestinian rivals — his spell in jail has done nothing to diminish his popularity on the street. Opinion polls consistently put him second or third to Arafat with Mr Abbas barely registering on the graph.

His ability to deal with the Israelis is also beyond question — lengthy previous spells in Israeli jails from his student days have left him fluent in Hebrew.

More importantly, his incarceration left him ideally placed to build bridges with other Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad prisoners in Israeli jails, a constituency just as influential in the Palestinian cause as the jailed godfathers of the IRA or loyalists in Northern Ireland.

He also has a shrewd campaign behind him.

Supporters on the Israeli Left and Palestinian moderates sell him as the classic missed opportunity for Israel — a young, secular Palestinian committed to the principle of Israeli and Palestinian states living side by side. But he became disillusioned and frustrated after seeing the relentless expansion of Israeli settlements across the West Bank and Gaza in the years after the signing of the Oslo accords.

Israel sees Barghouti as an opportunist terrorist who talked until it stopped suiting him, then turned to violence.

This year he was sentenced to five life terms for his role in the murder of five people killed by Palestinian gunmen in Israel in 2001 and 2002, including a Greek Orthodox monk. Prosecutors alleged that he recruited and funded the gunmen who carried out the attacks.

Internally, however, his candidacy would be hugely divisive within Fatah.

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