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Labor's new list: young, leftist, social-oriented

The primary elections held by the Labor Party produced a list dominated by young left-wing candidates who are identified with the social protests, and excluding Labor's veteran politicians.
Labour party candidates Itzik Shmuli (R) and Stav Shaffir attend a mock election at a high school in Ramat Gan near Tel Aviv December 6, 2012. The leaders of a grassroots social protest movement that swept Israel in 2011, Shaffir and Shmuli, have shot to the top of a rejuvenated Labour party that polls say will at least double its power in a Jan. 22 general election that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing Likud is forecast to win. Picture taken December 6, 2012. REUTERS/Amir Cohen (ISRAEL - Tags
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The list of Labor Party candidates elected Jan. 13 to run for the 20th Knesset represents, first and foremost, a deep and dramatic shift within the party’s internal structure. It shows the decline of the main party power politicos, who determined fates through their megadeals and drew up political hit lists to take out their rivals. In contrast, the current list prioritizes free voters, who owe their allegiance to no one.

The election of two young leaders of the 2011 social protest movement, Stav Shaffir and Itzik Shmuli, to the fourth and fifth slots respectively — far ahead of Labor Party election committee Chairman Eitan Cabel — is one of the most prominent expressions of the party’s changing DNA. The disappearance of such enduring figures as former Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer and the former chairman of the Histadrut Labor Union Ofer Eini from the primary landscape is yet another example of the end of the era of the “voting box commanders [where party politicos gathered mass voters through unions or other methods].” The new breed of politics has taken over the veteran party.

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