Will Shelly Yachimovich Win Back Israel's Left?
Shelly Yachimovich, leader of the Labor Party, declared that she will not join a Likud-led government, in a last-minute attempt to win back her leftist electorate, writes Mazal Mualem.
For long weeks, [Israeli] Labor party leader Shelly Yachimovich has managed to avoid closing any doors to a post-election coalition agreement with [Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu. She insisted on leaving open the option of joining forces with him even following the alliance forged by Netanyahu and Yisrael Beiteinu leader Avigdor Liberman, which painted the future government the colors of the extreme right just as the election campaign was launched.
And even when, in the past few weeks, Netanyahu turned further to the right, driven by the loss of mandates to Naftali Bennett’s [far-right] HaBayit HaYehudi party [as indicated by the polls], she kept to this strategy of hers. She managed to maintain her right to silence even when the Israeli government set out to build hundreds of housing units in East Jerusalem, antagonizing both Europe and the United States.
She stood firm all along — until last Thursday (Jan. 3). On that day, Yachimovich convened a special press conference and taking the podium, she explicitly announced: “I am not going to join the extreme-right government of Netanyahu and Liberman.” Her words dropped like a bomb on the Israeli political establishment, in particular, and on the Israeli public, in general. It was an admission of failure of an entire [political] conception.
In fact, it is the failure of the most significant socio-political venture undertaken in Israel in recent years. Admirably holding on to her stance, Yachimovich has consistently argued that the agenda of the Israeli public has changed – that it’s the socio-economic issues rather than the political and security issues that preoccupy the Israeli public in the wake of the social justice protest movement [that swept Israel in 2011]. She sought to demonstrate that the election could be won over the social agenda alone or, as she herself put it [alluding to the “cottage cheese protest” — the consumer boycott of the big dairy cartels]: “The price of cottage cheese is of concern to the public at large, whether on the left or on the right of the political map, far more so than the Iranian nuke.”
