Avi Gabbay’s election as chairman of the Labor Party on July 10 has renewed the battle for the leadership of the center-left bloc with Yair Lapid, the chairman of Yesh Atid. While Gabbay declared on the night of his surprising election that his win is the start of the journey to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the road there is very long, and it passes through Lapid’s parliamentary seats.
Gabbay’s first success in this journey is returning Labor to the top of the center-left camp in polls conducted immediately after the primaries. His party shot up past Yesh Atid and theoretically would "win back" several of the seats that have gradually shifted in polls to Yesh Atid since the 2015 election. As for voters from the right-wing bloc, so far Gabbay has succeeded in moving just a few of them, mostly from his former patron Moshe Kahlon, the chairman of the Kulanu Party.
