riel Sharon was defying the odds when he called an election for Jan. 28, eight months before his term runs out. No Israeli prime minister who called early elections has ever won. But the polls gave him such a lead that Israelis even began talking of a boring election.

In Israel, though, that notion is fated to remain an oxymoron. With Mr. Sharon now sinking into a nasty campaign-financing scandal, the race has abruptly turned into an intriguing muddle. What makes it especially so is that the contest is no longer only between doves and hawks, the familiar battleground of recent elections, but also between the secular and the religious.

The balance could still change radically before the voting. But one possible outcome, at least mathematically, is that Israel could end up with a coalition that not only excludes the militantly Orthodox parties, but is actually pledged to dismantle the various exemptions, benefits and powers that the strictly religious have accumulated, in part through years of wielding the swing votes in parliament. That would amount to a wrenching confrontation over the very definition of a Jewish state — a confrontation most Israelis had been content to delay until the conflict with the Arabs was resolved.

What has raised this possibility is the emergence of a militantly secular party, Shinui, as a potential alternative to the religious parties. The basic arithmetic is this: The scandal that has embroiled Mr. Sharon — an accusation that he or his family took a private loan to repay a political contribution — has eroded the standing of his Likud party. But instead of going over to the Labor party, the left-wing opposition, many Likud dropouts have taken refuge either in the religious right — mostly the Shas party — or in its polar opposite, the secular Shinui.

"They are not gaining because of the religion issue," Yossi Beilin, a former government minister running for parliament on the left-wing Meretz slate, said of Shinui. "They are gaining because they're so vague in their general views. Voting for Shinui is the closest to not voting. People say we don't like Likud, we don't like Labor, so we'll vote Shinui. They are the Archie Bunkers of Israel — they're against the ultra-Orthodox, they're against Arabs."

If the current polling figures hold, Mr. Sharon and Likud will still come out as the biggest bloc in the parliament, but they will require multiple coalition parties to rule.

One option would be a right-religious cluster, which would have to include ultra-nationalists who oppose any concessions to the Palestinians, to achieve the 61 votes needed to control the 120-seat Knesset. The other would be a secular coalition with Labor and Shinui, for which Shinui's condition would be that the government dismantle the powers and benefits of the religious.

The party, whose name means "change" in Hebrew, was founded in 1974, with both liberal and centrist members, as a secular party. It remained largely obscure until a journalist, Tommy Lapid, came to the helm in 1999 and focused the party sharply on combating what Shinui's Web site (www.shinui.org.il) describes as the "clericalist, coercive and discriminatory policies" of the militantly Orthodox parties.

"This is quite an interesting phenomenon," said Yossi Alpher, a political analyst, who said Shinui's rise as a voice of secular Jews mirrors the earlier rise of Shas, a party organized as a voice of the religious.

Just as Labor and Likud have come to represent Israelis who vote as either doves or hawks in recent years, the rise of Shinui to match Shas means there will now be another axis along which Israelis can divide — as secular and religious. But this could confound the math of forming a parliamentary coalition, at least so far as the traditional issues of left and right are concerned, because the religious include both doves and hawks, and so do the secularists.

In fact, the religious-secular split has long been a fundamental issue in Israeli society, with many Israelis resentful of the powers that the very traditional Orthodox Jews, known as the haredim, have amassed. These include rabbinical control over marriage and burial, exemptions from the military for yeshiva students and financial benefits for the large haredi families.

Though polls show that a majority of Israelis resent these privileges, commentators said the support for Shinui reflects less a surge in militant secularism than a protest against corruption in Likud.

The scandal focusing on Mr. Sharon is murky, involving among other things a $1.5 million loan that the prime minister, or his sons, received from a South African businessman. But the revelations came after another scandal — allegations of favors traded for Likud parliamentary nominations — and the polls showed a steady drop.

But the voters who left were still hawks opposed to the policies of the Labor standard-bearer, Amram Mitzna, whose platform includes unilaterally closing some Jewish settlements and reopening talks with the Palestinian Authority.

Then the question is whether Israelis are really prepared for the consequences. The haredim have often mounted fierce protests to safeguard their ways, and they would resist any infringement of what they perceive as the divinely ordained obligations of Jewish authorities. However strongly secular Jews may resent the rabbis' power, few would long tolerate pitched battles between Jewish police and religious Jews.

"Shinui's program enjoys the support of about 60 percent of Israelis, so there would be a mandate," said Hemi Shalev, a commentator for the newspaper Maariv. "But my own opinion is that the support is strong so long as it's in theory. When Israelis realize what it may mean in terms of internal relations, I'm not sure that people will want to press ahead."