The primaries for the Democrats’ Knesset list marked the party’s defining moment since Yair Golan assumed its leadership in May 2024.
Of the party’s 112,000 members, a figure that has doubled since 2022, 86% took part in the vote, which for the first time was conducted entirely online rather than at physical polling stations.
The exceptionally high turnout reflects the renewed mobilization of Israel’s left-wing camp and demonstrates the party’s organizational revival.
To Golan’s credit, he inherited a political party on the verge of collapse after his predecessor, Merav Michaeli, had led Labor to an electoral disaster in the 2022 election, when it secured only four seats.
At the time, Golan was virtually the only senior politician prepared to assume responsibility for what had become one of the least attractive political assets in Israeli politics. Poll after poll suggested that Labor might fail to cross the electoral threshold.
Nevertheless, he set out to reunite Labor with Meretz and restore the movement to political relevance. On that central promise, he delivered.
Current polling indicates that the Democrats could win around ten seats in the 2026 election, two more than Labor and Meretz would have won had they contested the 2022 election on a joint ticket.
Despite these achievements, the composition of the party’s candidate list illustrates how far it has drifted from the Israeli mainstream. Meretz has long been associated with the far Left of the political spectrum.
Yet many veteran Labor supporters have undoubtedly been astonished to witness the political movement that founded the State of Israel transformed into a party increasingly identified with the far Left.
They remember a very different Labor Party, one whose leading candidates included Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, Shlomo Ben-Ami, Matan Vilnai, and Isaac Herzog, politicians firmly rooted in the Israeli mainstream.
Since the September 2019 election, and particularly following Michaeli’s victory in the leadership primaries ahead of the 2021 election, Labor’s parliamentary list has become increasingly dominated by candidates associated with the ideological Left.
The candidate list for the 2026 election suggests that this transformation has now reached its culmination.
The top three positions are occupied by incumbent Knesset members Naama Lazimi, Efrat Rayten, and Gilad Kariv.
In fourth place is Yair Fink, a veteran Labor activist who has proudly stated that he raised more than one million shekels for the residents of the Palestinian village of Huwara, from which numerous terrorist attacks have originated.
Fifth is attorney Gaby Lasky, a former Meretz MK who has represented, among others, Palestinians convicted of assaulting IDF soldiers, incitement, and stone-throwing offenses.
Sixth is Omri Ronen, one of the founders of Brothers in Arms, who publicly called for military refusal and was subsequently dismissed from reserve duty.
In seventh place is former Meretz MK Michal Rozin, and eighth is another prominent Kaplan protest activist, Moshe Radman, who declared during one demonstration that “if we survived Hitler, we will survive [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu as well.”
In conclusion, the Democrats’ candidate list embodies a fusion of the Kaplan protest movement and the far Left that bears little resemblance to the Labor Party of its formative decades.
It is therefore unsurprising that the list is dominated by Kaplan protest activists and figures from the ideological Left, many of whom have made highly controversial public statements in recent years.
After all, the party’s chairman has himself repeatedly attracted controversy.
Beyond his well-known remarks as deputy chief of staff, in which he argued that he identified developments in Israel reminiscent of processes that occurred in Germany before the rise of Nazism, Golan became one of the most prominent retired generals to support civil disobedience and military refusal during the protests against the Netanyahu government’s judicial reform.
He subsequently continued to advocate widespread civil disobedience. The culmination came during the war, when, in May 2025, he declared that “a sane country does not kill babies as a hobby.”
As the old saying goes: like leader, like followers.
The writer is a lecturer and research fellow at the University of South Wales, UK. Author of Collapse: Israeli Labor Party 1992-2024.