Zionist Camp’s Gabbay scrambles to stop poll slide
As his poll numbers continue to dive, Zionist Camp leader Avi Gabbay is returning to the party’s traditional electorate.
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.
Lapid, on the other hand, is on the rise: He’s remained loyal to the strategic line of a centrist party, is keeping an official mien, isn’t zigzagging and is enjoying the effects of the supermarket law, which reinforces his status as a secular leader. The chairman of Yesh Atid has managed in recent polls to increase the percentage of people who think he’s suited to be prime minister and to close the gap with Netanyahu, while Gabbay is treading water. The effect of Gabbay’s election has been erased, and the political system has returned to where it was a year ago, where Lapid, even though he isn’t the head of the opposition, is the main challenger to Netanyahu and the Likud for prime minister.
In addition, Lapid has gained roundabout support from potential partners to a future government. Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon and Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman — two leaders of coalition parties who have a personal beef with Gabbay — coordinated announcements two and a half months ago that there is no chance that they would join his government after the next election because he’s a leftist. Such a statement was meant to scare the soft right away from him.
