Embattled Labor sets sights on a new leader to revitalize party
Tuesday’s primary pits former head Amir Peretz against social protest leaders Itzik Shmuli and Stav Shaffir; some 65,000 members eligible to vote
Raoul Wootliff is a former Times of Israel political correspondent and Daily Briefing podcast producer.
Tens of thousands of Labor party members will head to the polls on Tuesday in the first round of voting for a new leader of the center-left party that, having led Israel for its first three decades, is now fighting to stay relevant.
From 10 a.m. to 10 p.m, some 65,000 voters will be eligible to cast their ballots at 105 polling stations across the country, with results expected within hours of polls closing. The voting was extended by an hour amid widespread protests by Israel’s Ethiopian community against police violence, which held up traffic across the country.
The race sees party veteran and former leader MK Amir Peretz facing off against Labor’s youngest MKs, Itzik Shmuli and Stav Shaffir, who their supporters say represent a last chance to revitalize the once-venerable faction and save it from oblivion.
The winner of Tuesday’s race will likely determine whether the party, plagued by internal divisions, will be able to regain its past glory. Labor has seen its fortunes tumble in recent years, hit by a rightward shift among Israeli voters, turmoil in the party, and the emergence of various new political players that have eroded its base.
One of the key issues that will face the next leader is the possibility of allying with other center-left factions ahead of national elections in September, including the new, as-yet-unnamed party of former prime minister and Labor leader Ehud Barak.
The position of party chief was opened when current leader Avi Gabbay announced that he would step down after leading Labor to its worst ever electoral showing and entertaining an offer by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to join his prospective coalition, a move met with heavy internal criticism.
In April’s election, Labor dropped from the 24 Knesset seats it received as part of the Zionist Union in 2015 to just six. In total, the party gained only 4.43 percent of the national vote.
Shmuli and Shaffir entered the Knesset in 2013 after making a name for themselves as leaders of the 2011 social protests. Both have used their primary campaign to offer a youthful hope to return the party to prominence.
A former chair of the National Union of Israeli Students, Shmuli, 38, has recently risen within the party establishment by aligning himself with Gabbay despite the fierce criticism of the incumbent leader from other directions. After Gabbay broke off his partnership with Hatnua chair Tzipi Livni in January, Shmuli was appointed Labor faction leader and opposition whip, taking over the latter role from Hatnua MK Yoel Hasson.
As an MK, and in his brief role as faction leader, Shmuli has championed minority rights, disabled people’s rights and benefits for pensioners. After publicly coming out as gay following a deadly stabbing attack at the Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade in 2015, he has also become a key lawmaker in the battle for homosexual surrogacy rights.
Having sat on the powerful Knesset Finance Committee and currently chairing the parliament’s Transparency Committee, Shaffir, 33, has established herself as an outspoken opponent of economic inequality and advocate of transparency in government.
Witheringly critical of the government’s ostensible failures to tackle socioeconomic inequality, to deal with the fate of tens of thousands of illegal immigrants, to advance a diplomatic process with the Arab world, and to prevent what she sees as Israel’s growing isolation, Shaffir has emerged as one of Labor’s most vociferous voices and, like Shumli, has gained a strong following of activists and supporters.
Peretz, who led Labor from 2005 to 2007, is seeking support from party members after they most recently rejected him in favor of Gabbay in the 2017 leadership race.
A Knesset member since 1988, Peretz left Labor in the 1990s to form the Am Ehad party, which merged back with Labor in 2005. In 2012, Peretz abandoned his political home again in favor of Livni’s Hatnua party, which in late 2014 joined forces with Labor to form the Zionist Union. But in February 2016, two years after he resigned from his post as environmental protection minister in Netanyahu’s government over the budget, Peretz announced that he was returning to Labor.
Peretz has a mixed military legacy: As defense minister during the 2006 Second Lebanon War, Peretz — who had little significant military experience before assuming the post — was strongly criticized by the government-appointed Winograd Commission, though he has since attempted to reframe the narrative in his favor. He is also, however, credited with approving the development of the Iron Dome anti-missile system.
While the 67-year-old is seen as somewhat of a dinosaur by some younger members of the party, he has played on his experience, both as a minister and a party veteran, to claim that only he has the political clout to restore Labor’s status as a major player.
Since adopting the primary system in 1992, Labor has not reelected a single leader for two consecutive terms.
It’s been a dizzying shuffle of leaders: Yitzhak Rabin was replaced by Shimon Peres after the former’s assassination in 1995. Peres was replaced by Barak in 1997 after losing the general election the year before to Benjamin Netanyahu. Barak was replaced by Binyamin Ben-Eliezer in 2001 after Barak’s election loss to Likud’s Ariel Sharon that year. Amram Mitzna defeated Ben-Eliezer for party leader in 2002, but was himself soon replaced by Peres after the loss to Sharon’s Likud in the 2003 elections. Peretz defeated Peres for party leadership in 2005, then lost to a revivified Barak in 2007 in the wake of the previous year’s Second Lebanon War. Barak abandoned the party in 2011, triggering a leadership race won by Shelly Yachimovich, who then lost the top spot just two years later to Isaac Herzog. Herzog, despite a relatively strong showing in the 2015 elections, was still roundly beaten by Netanyahu’s center-right Likud, paving the way for his eventual replacement by current leader Gabbay.
Primaries were introduced to Israeli politics in the early 1990s, when several major parties sought to bolster public support by increasing participation in the democratic process. Since then, however, most new parties have forgone internal elections, opting instead for a system in which the party leader or a committee of officials choose a “perfect” slate, unsullied by the caprices of party members.
The number of people actively taking part in the primaries from each party has also declined. In the first primaries of the Labor party in 1992, there were over 160,000 eligible voters; in 2015 just 61 percent of only 49,000 paid up members voted. Ahead of April’s election, 56.4% of members voted for the party’s electoral list.
Unless there is a decisive winner with over 40% of the votes in the first round on Tuesday, a run-off vote between the two top candidates will be held next Monday.
