Such a tangle was not long left. Although the Meretz conference decided that there will be no primaries, and that the list will be filmed in the following order – Nitzan Horowitz, Tamar Zandberg, Ilan Gilon, Issawi Frij – but this is where the problems begin. Where is the democratic camp in this story? Where will Shafir and Yair Golan fall? Who is willing to take on a split of this camp, which united only five months ago?
The key figure is Tamar Zandberg, the strongest woman today in March. Zandberg lost to Horowitz in the race for the presidency six months ago, but in practice she is still chairing the field.
Zandberg, along with Fridge and Musi Raz, decided that the opening quartet would include only Meretz members. This means that Stav Shafir (2nd place in the Democratic camp) and Yair Golan (3rd place) will be pushed back. The chairman of the Horowitz party knows that this means the dissolution of the democratic camp. Zandberg threatened Horowitz that if he did not respond, she would run against him for the Meretz leadership.
“Zandberg attached a gun to his temple,” says a senior Meretz official. “She’s not talking about dismantling, but about ‘rearranging,’ but it’s basically the same thing, and for now there is no solution.”
Zandberg argues that Meretz should go for a left-wing campaign, in contrast to the September elections, so the union with Ehud Barak forced other directions. “In the election, we went for ‘just not Bibi,’ religion and corruption. There was no difference between us and blue-and-white,” she tells Israel Time.
“We went towards the center of the map with this connection. Now we need to go back to the original flags: occupation, peace, annexation of settlements, the danger of sovereignty. There is a lot of free space on the left, because the Labor Party is social, not political.”
“In the election we went for ‘just not Bibi’, religion and corruption. There was no difference between us and blue and white. We went towards the center of the map with this connection. Now we have to go back to the original flags: occupation, peace, annexation of settlements, danger of sovereignty.”
Zandberg mostly does not want to see Shafir fall embedded in the list ahead of her. For that she will drop everything. Shafir is the tragic figure on the left at the moment. The social protest star, who took to the streets, along with Daphne Leaf and Itzik Shmuli, hundreds of thousands of people in the summer of 2011, was left homeless. Only with a tent.
Shafir left the Labor Party, headed the Green Movement, and took second place in the Democratic camp. She has since been burned. On the cell phone of party chairman Amir Peretz – Shafir is blocked. Meretz claims that the conflicted Shafir prevents a connection with the work, even though Orly Levy-Aboksis is the one who vetoes Meretz.
The argument against Shafir is that it did not provide the seats. The Democratic camp raised Meretz from four seats in the April elections to five seats in the September elections, but Meretz claims that there is no achievement here, relative to the price paid by Meretz to Shafir and Lair Golan, the representative of Ehud Barak, who initiated the union and now completely out of the picture. It is also said there that the party withdrew in the Arab sector, which was not worth the union. Issawi Farage, as is well known, remained outside the Knesset.
Shafir left work, headed the Green Movement, and took second place in the Democratic camp. She has since been burned. On the cell phone of party chairman Amir Peretz – Shafir is blocked
Shafir is sure that she has been wronged. She claims that she is the one who saved the left, that she was the glue that connected Barak’s party with Meretz. If she had not made the connection, the two parties would have run separately and neither would have passed the blocking percentage.
Shafir now offers open primaries on the left, but no one hears. She commands people to the green movement and hints that she will run alone. It doesn’t look good either. It is estimated that Meretz will offer her fifth place on the list, at best, and she will have no choice but to agree.
And what about Yair Golan? Unlike Shafir, Meretz loves Golan. You will not hear a bad word about him at the top, even though he comes from outside. BMeretz is happy to see in their company finally Maj. Gen. Res., Who was a serious candidate for the post of chief of staff, a leftist in his views, a humble type who speaks the language of the party and suits it.
Will these qualities make Golan a candidate for a viable place? Meretz is not ready to commit. “We want it. It will be semi-realistic, borderline,” as one senior official put it. Now it only remains to be seen whether Meretz itself will be realistic in the coming March.