The winner who won’t be prime minister
Op-ed: The Labor Party members heading to the polls Tuesday aren’t going to elect Israel’s next leader. The top five candidates are all good and worthy people who would make excellent ministers, but none of them is an alternative to Netanyahu.
The party members know that. The contenders, at least most of them, are deluding themselves, or us, or simply pretending that electing them is like electing the next candidate for prime minister, the one who will run against Benjamin Netanyahu—and win.
The top five candidates—Isaac Herzog, Amir Peretz, Omer Bar-Lev, Avi Gabbay and Erel Margalit—are all good and worthy people. They are all men with good intentions, with a history of accomplishing things, some more and some less. Each one of them could be an excellent minister, part of a remarkable Knesset team. None of them, however, is capable of toppling the Netanyahu government. None of them has the sparkle that Ehud Barak had when he defeated Netanyahu in 1999.
That may be why the party which founded the State of Israel has only 52,000 members today. In 1996, it had 300,000 members, and 200,000 of them voted in the primary elections. This time, approximately 30,000 are expected to arrive at the polls, and the number could be lower, depending on the heat.
The candidates were not the only ones worn out by their campaigns over the past few months. The never-ending panels, the thousands of text messages, the mutual besmirching and the reports on corruption irritated not only the entire public, but also those who are supposed to vote Tuesday. The debates, it seems, didn’t give any candidate an advantage. They only added to the lack of enthusiasm. I won’t be surprised if it turns out that many voters were unable to decide who their favorite candidate was before entering the polling station.
Unfortunately, there’s a small chance that it will end in the first round. None of the candidates is expected to receive the required 40 percent of the votes, and the party members will be forced to drag themselves to the polling stations for another round next week.
Former party leader Amir Peretz is believed to have the highest chance of making it to the second round. He made an impressive comeback in the Labor Party, especially for someone who left the party and returned to compete (once again) for its top spot. Peretz is an experienced man. He has held all the significant positions offered by Israeli politics: Deputy prime minister, defense minister, environmental protection minister, cabinet member, opposition leader, as well as chairman of the Histadrut Labor Federation and head of the Sderot Local Council. He managed to soften the opposition against him inside the party, and the success of the Iron Dome defense system, which he insisted on developing as defense minister, paved the way for him even among sworn rivals.
Peretz’s supreme goal is to receive more than 40 percent of the votes and get elected in the first round. A second round won’t be good for him. It may create quite a big front against him by all those who wish to settle the score with him. On the other hand, if he is elected, instead of having the whole party behind him, Herzog and Tzipi Livni will launch a campaign for open primaries and undermine his leadership.
The identity of the candidate who will compete against Peretz in the second round is a mystery. Gabbay could definitely surprise everyone. First of all, he is a new and quite sympathetic face. On the other hand, there is a lot of pretension in joining a new party and immediately striving to lead it. And the Labor party, as we know, likes its leader to be worn out and comfortable. Which brings us to the second candidate who may compete against Peretz—the worn out and comfortable Herzog, who seems to have made a nice recovery, but has no chance of beating Netanyahu even if he does win the primary elections. To his credit, he knows that, which explains the motivation to hold open primaries and elect a candidate for prime minister.
And there’s Margalit, who hasn’t taken root in people’s hearts, perhaps because of his hyperactivity, and Bar-Lev, a gentle, polite and moderate person. In these kinds of competitions, however, the winners are the ones who can be defined as “predators.”
But as I said, it doesn’t really matter who wins the Labor elections. He won’t be the next prime minister. Yet the people heading to the polls Tuesday still hope it happens somehow, and that Mr. Right shows up, sweeps the political system off its feet and becomes a proper alternative to the current government.
