Yachimovich calls Labor primaries for November

The Labor Party will hold early leadership elections in November, party chief Shelly Yachimovich said Sunday, in a move that may give the faction its seventh leader in only a dozen years.

The instability, party leaders have long argued, has been a key obstacle preventing the Labor Party from winning at the ballot box and regaining its historic role at the helm of national affairs. In comparison, the ruling Likud party has famously only had four leaders since the founding of the state, when it was known as Herut.

Yachimovich announced in a press conference in Tel Aviv that she would schedule a primary vote for November 14, when the party’s 60,000 registered members will have a chance to elect a party leader who is expected to serve as opposition head for the next three years.

In launching her own reelection campaign, her first appeal was to stability. She called on supporters to help her “make history” in becoming “the first party chair in a long time to be reelected.”

Yachimovich announced she would be calling a meeting of the party’s 1,800-member convention in the coming weeks and asking it to set the November primary date.

“A party that believes in democracy must itself be democratic,” Yachimovich said. She emphasized that the party race would be open to all members. “Our door is open. There is no ‘cooling off’ period for the party leader’s position.”

She promised a primary that would be “fair, respectable, but also lively, about our way, our ideology, leadership, and everything that party members decide is important.”

Within hours of her announcement, other party leadership hopefuls began examining their political options in earnest. MKs Eitan Cabel, Isaac Herzog and Erel Margalit, all widely expected to throw their hats in the ring, reportedly scheduled a meeting to discuss joining forces to unseat the relatively popular Yachimovich.

Labor’s Secretary-General, MK Hilik Bar, who runs a significant part of the party apparatus and has promised “to stay objective” in the race, told The Times of Israel Sunday that holding the race so soon after a national election would help the party in the long term.

“The party will finish its internal battles as early as possible and stand ready to compete on the national stage long before the other parties,” he said.

Meanwhile, MK Michal Biran, a former parliamentary aide to Yachimovich, announced her support for the incumbent leader Sunday, according to Walla. “In the past few years, the Labor Party has been in a process of growth and renewal,” Biran said in a statement. “Many thousands of new members have joined our ranks in order to return the party to its social-democratic, Zionist and peace-seeking path.”

Yachimovich quickly sought to position herself on Sunday as the defender of the Israeli middle and working classes.

“We are the defensive shield of the 99% of Israelis that this government couldn’t care less about, and a defensive shield must be whole and strong,” Yachimovich wrote on Facebook shortly after her announcement.

She said the November timing would place the primary race “after our battle over this budget of [austerity] decrees and the Arrangements Bill. Our true fight,” she told party members, “is not internal, but against a government that has reached new lows in the trampling of its citizens, in its imperviousness to inequality, in the destruction of the middle class and the painful hits being meted out to the poor, in the worship and utter, embarrassing, transparent surrender to the interest of a small, well-connected interest group to which [government ministers] belong.”

Yachimovich was criticized by some party leaders for running an election campaign focused entirely on socioeconomic issues and steering clear of the peace process, traditionally a key Labor plank. She has recently returned to speaking about the peace process, criticizing the government for failing to do enough to engage the Palestinians in peace talks.

The peace process was an integral part of her primary campaign rhetoric on Sunday.

Israel’s current government is one with only two kinds of members, she said, “those who gave up on the Zionist vision of a Jewish and democratic state and believe honestly and truly that there should be a binational state in this land, and those who won’t raise a finger, and for a seat in the government are sharing in the cowardly failure to take advantage of the new opportunities that the geopolitical situation offers us to retake control of the diplomatic process, rather than getting dragged into it by force.”