While the Zionist Camp’s decline in the polls has become a troubling collapse in recent weeks, chairman Avi Gabbay could take comfort in the fact that no one from his party’s leadership has publicly challenged him yet.
About half a year since his surprising election, with his lofty ambitions to get to 30 mandates in the next election and return the party to power — Gabbay is moving further from the target. On the way, he’s discovering that the strategy he thought would pay off — winking to the right, getting close to the ultra-Orthodox and spurning the party’s base — is yielding the opposite result. Precious mandates have fled to Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid and the awakening Meretz Party, the Likud members aren’t coming and the future appears grim. Current polls show that the party would lose about half of the 24 mandates it won in 2015, and even the most flattering fall very far from the ambitious goal Gabbay set for himself.
