The dark side of Labor’s upbeat primary

‘This is a morning of hope!” So began Wednesday morning’s statement from Labor party leader Isaac Herzog, summing up the party’s primary results from the day before.

“Yesterday we chose an excellent list, clean, brave and activist, steeped in Zionism, that combines experience and innovative thinking, deep ideological [commitment] and enormous executive ability,” he gushed.

Indeed, there is much to commend in the new Labor list, which will run together with Tzipi Livni’s former Hatnua party in the March elections as the “Zionist Camp.”

Three of the top five Labor slots (after party leader Herzog) went to women: Shelly Yachimovich, Stav Shaffir and Merav Michaeli. When one includes the two party leaders at the top of the joint Labor-Hatnua “Zionist Camp” Knesset list, Herzog and Tzipi Livni, one finds four women among the top seven. The contrast with Likud, where only two women, Miri Regev (at #5) and Gila Gamliel (#14), can be found in the top 24 slots, couldn’t be more stark.

Even as the 29-year-old Shaffir (#2) and 34-year-old Itzik Shmuli (#3) soared in the list, the party rank and file did not neglect their more experienced colleagues. Yachimovich, a veteran of three Knessets, tops the list, while the party’s grizzled “security candidate,” ex-Sayeret Matkal commander Omer Bar-Lev, won fourth place.

The list boasts some of the most active MKs from the last Knesset, and its most active and successful “oppositionists.” Yachimovich and Shaffir in particular solidified their reputations in the last Knesset by leading the charge for transparency in Knesset committees, often loudly and effectively taking the coalition to task on economic issues and the state budget.

Old and young, women alongside men, brimming with capable and well-known activists — it is a list that should make any party on any side of the political spectrum proud.

Yet for all the compliments that might be foisted on the individual personalities that make up the Labor list, Tuesday’s primary also signaled that all is not well in the party as a whole.

Put simply, the biggest loser in Tuesday’s primary was not the underperforming Eitan Cabel (#6) or the disappointed Moshe Mizrahi (slated for #29 in the final joint list), but Herzog himself. Labor’s primary voters dramatically favored candidates not identified with Herzog or his supporters.

While all the party’s leaders worked hard on Tuesday to deny the significance of this fact, noting that Herzog had himself endorsed his main competitor Yachimovich, and that Michaeli, at #5, was a close ally of the party leader, the simple fact is inescapable: the party’s most powerful and influential figures are now the ones least dependent on or loyal to Labor’s chief.

It is no secret, and no surprise, that Herzog sees in ex-party leader Yachimovich a tangible threat to his rule of the party. And historical precedent suggests that if he fails to win the premiership on March 17, Election Day, it is exceedingly unlikely that he will be able to retain the top spot. Since 1992, with Yitzhak Rabin’s return as party leader, Labor has replaced its number-one at an average of every two years.

It’s a dizzying history: Rabin was replaced by Shimon Peres after the former’s assassination in 1995. Peres was replaced by Ehud 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. Amir 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.

It is hard to think of a more conspicuous sign of the deep political crisis that has gripped the party for the better part of the past two decades than this bewildering instability at its helm.

It’s no small matter, then, that Tuesday’s primary seemed to leave Herzog’s most outspoken supporters behind, while candidates more closely associated with his chief rival Yachimovich surged ahead.

The two “camps” aren’t hard to identify. In the November 2013 leadership primary between Herzog and Yachimovich, three MKs chose to side with the underdog Herzog in defiance of the preponderance of polls and pundits who favored Yachimovich. When Herzog won the race, the media labeled this four-member alliance of Herzog, Cabel, Michaeli and Erel Margalit the “victorious quartet.”

This week, Israel’s Hebrew-speaking media was once again sounding the nearly unanimous opinion that Cabel, a veteran of no less than six Knessets, would place second on the list, just behind Yachimovich. Some even dared to speculate that he might actually beat her for the top spot after the party leader.

But voters stymied those expectations, dropping Cabel from second place to sixth, sandwiched between the 2013 quartet’s other two members, Michaeli at #5 and Margalit at #7.

Is it mere coincidence that those who surged in their stead — Shaffir, Shmuli and Bar-Lev at slots 2, 3 and 4 — were among the most outspoken supporters of Yachimovich in the 2013 race?

So has Herzog lost control of the party? Is he going into the election a weakened leader internally, destined to be felled if he fails to deliver the Prime Minister’s Office?

Yes and no.

A closer look at the numbers suggests that Herzog’s apparent weakness in the primary reflects a complex tension within the party, a tension that favored Yachimovich’s allies but did not actually lead to any significant drop in support for Herzog’s.

Consider the evidence. Cabel’s name appeared on 15,903 ballots on Tuesday; in the 2012 party list primary, he got an almost identical 15,991. That is, his drop from second place to sixth wasn’t due to a dramatic loss of votes, but rather to a jump in support for other candidates.

(Important procedural note: Each primary voter submitted a list of eight to 10 names on their ballot on Tuesday, so the 28,367 valid ballots actually account for as many as ten times that in individual votes.)

Herzog confidante Merav Michaeli, who received Herzog’s most avid endorsement (Hebrew link) earlier this week, actually surged in popularity, from 11,712 votes in 2012 to 17,936 on Tuesday. Michaeli’s failure to budge from fifth place was not a sign of failure, but of success. In the 2012 vote she actually won the ninth-highest number of votes — but as the highest-scoring woman in the race saw herself bumped up four slots to the nearest position reserved for a woman. On Tuesday Michaeli needed no such help, winning the fifth slot through the straightforward expedient of having garnered more votes than Cabel at #6.

Margalit, too, saw a bump in votes, from 14,345 in the last primary to 15,421 in this one.

Herzog’s camp didn’t crash. Rather, others soared.

Shaffir went from 9,649 votes in 2012, the thirteenth-highest showing (though she also moved up to a women-only slot at #9), to a whopping 21,588 on Tuesday — her name appearing on fully 76% of all ballots.

Itzik Shmuli, who jumped from 12th to third, raised his vote total by over a third, from 13,365 in 2012 to 18,193 on Tuesday.

One could make the argument, then, that Herzog didn’t really lose ground, but that Shaffir, Shmuli, Bar-Lev and others simply brought new energy and excitement to Labor’s usually drab internal contests.

But that, too, tells only half the story. And it is the untold half of the story, largely unnoticed outside the party, that brings Herzog’s acute challenge in the wake of Tuesday’s primary into sharp relief.

In 2012, 60,424 Labor party members had the right to vote in the primary. In 2013, the number was estimated at some 55,000. On Tuesday, Labor’s own figures showed just under 49,000 — a drop of 11,000 members in two and a half years.

The number of actual votes cast also dropped. In 2012, 33,967 valid ballots were cast. In Tuesday’s primary that figure fell 16% to 28,367.

This steep decline in the membership and the number of active primary voters suggests that Labor lost some of its hold over its most devoted base over the past two years, a trend some analysts have blamed on Herzog’s uncharismatic leadership of the party.

But Herzog, while admittedly lacking the easy eloquence of a Netanyahu or even a Yachimovich, has proven that he possesses two characteristics that one might expect Labor supporters would find equally valuable: a piercing political acumen and an unbridled ambition to reclaim Labor’s lost status as a credible vehicle for national leadership.

By striking a deal with the centrist Livni last month to run as a joint list, Herzog pushed Labor’s poll showing from a dismal third place at 15 seats to first place with 24 and even 25. Labor’s soaring poll figures aren’t due to Livni’s popularity — alone, her Hatnua party polls at under four seats — but rather to the sudden possibility that the party might be following hundreds of thousands of its former supporters into the political center.

Herzog has committed Labor to a centrist path in the coming election, and the sharp boost this has brought in the polls, at least for the time being, has sparked a new energy in his shrinking party base.

And there lies Herzog’s dilemma. The very base so thrilled with the rising poll numbers does not share their leader’s centrist instincts and is less than thrilled at losing the party’s unambiguous identification with the left.

Tuesday’s dramatic boost for Yachimovich, Shaffir and their allies signals a recoiling by the party faithful from Herzog’s innovative strategy.

And if Tuesday’s primary are any indication, the dislike for this strategy is widespread.

Yachimovich, the most strident voice of the uncompromisingly dovish and socialist wing of the party, won roughly 42% of the vote in the leadership race in 2013 (fully 5,000 votes behind Herzog’s 58%). On Tuesday, however, she made it onto 81% of the ballots. Shaffir, similarly identified with the outspoken leftist branch, was on 28.4% of the ballots in the 2012 primary — and on 76% of them on Tuesday.

One of the first groups to take advantage of these tensions was the Likud election campaign, which put out a statement on Wednesday that toyed mercilessly with Labor’s exposed nerves.

“The Labor party chose an extreme leftist list that will endanger national security,” the statement read. “This is a decisively leftist list, inexperienced, anti-religious and without representation for immigrants.”

The last three complaints are mere decoration. The substantive argument is the one that accuses Labor of taking a “decidedly leftist” turn.

The Likud campaign’s loud remonstrations are better proof than anything a Herzog supporter might say that Herzog’s centrist strategy may be working. By pulling Livni away from Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid so early in the race, Herzog transformed Labor from a medium-sized political backwater into the most electorally credible alternative to Netanyahu that the country has seen in years. And by adopting explicitly centrist rhetoric that calls for separation from the Palestinians rather than suggesting that reconciliation or “peace” were in the cards, Herzog enabled large numbers of left-leaning Israelis whose faith in peace talks was punctured by the violent implosions of past negotiation attempts to at least reconsider a vote for the party that once led those efforts.

But the risks of this strategy also became apparent on Tuesday. Herzog’s bid for the center, which has brought him closer than any Labor chief since 2000 to potentially retaking the Prime Minister’s Office, does not reflect the views or wishes of large swaths of his party rank and file.

If Herzog wins in March, even his most bitter opponents in the party will be too busy celebrating the defeat of the invincible Netanyahu to recall their grumbling about his campaign strategy.

But in the far more likely event that he loses the election, it is fair to say that the party has already signaled its dissatisfaction — and its mutinous intentions.