Polls open in Labor party primaries; Yair Golan expected to win

Polls have opened in the Labor party’s primary, with 51,000 members eligible to vote.

Labor MKs Gilad Kariv and Naama Lazimi post photos on X voicing support for frontrunner Yair Golan.

Golan, an ex-Meretz MK and former IDF deputy chief of staff, is the odds-on favorite to win the primary, having pledged to “unify all leftist parties in Israel” into a single bloc in order to “fight for the destiny of Israel, for Israel as a democratic liberal state.”

The vote is of critical importance for both the party itself — which has consistently failed to cross the election threshold in recent opinion polls and therefore is in danger of not making it into the next Knesset at all — and for the further left-wing party Meretz, which failed to enter the parliament in the last election and is seeking a return path.

The primaries were supposed to be held in late 2022 but were delayed by the general election and the outbreak of the ongoing war in Gaza, sparked by Hamas’s October 7 massacre in southern Israel.