Until eight months ago, politicians and commentators speculated that Meretz, the leading left-wing party in the local Zionist political camp, would most likely cease to exist. Its condition was so fragile that even major figures in the party expressed pessimism about its prospects for survival in the last election campaign. Meretz Knesset member Nitzan Horowitz openly suggested at the time that Meretz should merge into a left-leaning political body to save itself from extinction. Meretz was considered a failed brand, an aging party that was passé. Its budget deficit heavily weighed on its continued activity and led to the closing of all branches of the party — those very branches that had once let out multitudes of young people on their way to peace demonstrations.

The transformation that Meretz has undergone since the election [January 2013], and even more intensively in the last couple of months, is nothing less than amazing — it is virtual resurrection, politically speaking. Meretz has been going through a recovery that started following the election, when the party doubled its power in parliament, from three to six Knesset seats. But it does not stop there.

As it turns out, the election results were just the trigger — the harbinger of a new era of revival for the party. According to two separate public opinion polls published last week [the week of July 21] — one of them in the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz and the other one, for Israeli TV’s Knesset channel — had the election been held today, the party would have garnered 10 or 12 seats, correspondingly.

And that's not all. Since the election, 10,000 new members have joined the party. Some of them are ex-Meretz members returning home after leaving the party in recent years. Others are former Labor or Kadima voters who deserted their parties and found in Meretz a new political home. This is a really remarkable growth, all the more striking considering that on the eve of the January election, there were a mere 2,000 members in Meretz.