It was March 2009. After a vehement and raucous debate, the members of the Labor Party’s Central Committee voted in favor of party Chairman Ehud Barak’s proposal that they join Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s second government. It was no easy battle. There was a large group of opponents, who said that the Labor Party should recuperate in the opposition, rather than serving as a fig leaf for another right-wing government. But that group faced off against much stronger forces, including former minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, the all-powerful head of the Histadrut Labor Union Ofer Eini, and former minister Shalom Simchon, Barak’s longtime confidante.

These three mega-politicians who controlled the party and its members had managed to grant Barak a second term as defense minister. They reasoned that having the Labor Party in the coalition would put the government on a more moderate footing, both economically and diplomatically. The approval that Barak received from the party’s Central Committee was the last hurdle in a much larger political game, which included a secret agreement between him (who was then head of the opposition) and Netanyahu, to join forces after the elections. Barak showed no interest in the fact that the Labor Party suffered a resounding slap in the face from its electorate, dropping to just 13 seats, and the right thing for it to do at the time would have been to rebuild itself in the opposition. He wanted to stay in the Defense Ministry, and that’s exactly what happened. If judged by its results, the fact that the Labor Party was part of the coalition did not lead to a diplomatic breakthrough, nor did it prevent a sharp rise in both the cost of living and the number of people living below the poverty line.

This important political maneuvering, which took place just five years ago, underscores how far the political system has shifted since then. Last week’s presidential elections (June 10) also brought the scope of these dramatic changes to the forefront.

First of all, the election battle itself put some of the country’s most senior politicians who sought to be elected president out of the picture entirely. For example, in the not so distant past, Silvan Shalom (Likud) was such a potent political force that he was appointed finance minister and foreign minister. At one point he regarded the president’s house as a stepping stone on his way to the prime minister’s office. Now, however, he is trying to clear his name after leaving the race under suspicion of having sexually harassed a member of his staff. Shalom was left beaten, publicly speaking, and the possibility of him running for prime minister is not even brought up anymore.