2005 Israeli Labor Party Leadership Election

Shimon Peres had served as Labor’s acting leader following the party’s defeat in the 2003 national election.[4] A former prime minister and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, he entered the leadership contest as the favorite.[5] He had been a dominant figure in Labor since 1974.[3]

Labor’s participation in Ariel Sharon’s government formed an important backdrop to the contest.[4] On January 10, 2005, Sharon formed a coalition including Labor to secure support for disengagement from the Gaza Strip; the government was approved by 58 votes to 56, while leftist and Arab opposition parties supporting disengagement abstained.[4] Labor’s support helped Sharon overcome opposition to withdrawal within Likud.[4] Peres’s support for joining the government received a mixed reception among Labor members, with disagreement over the relationship between coalition participation and the party’s left-of-center social and economic priorities.[4] The leadership change ultimately came shortly after the completion of Israel’s evacuation of Gaza.[6]

Peretz approached the contest through a career centered on organized labor and social policy.[5] He had chaired the Histadrut trade union federation since 1995 and had become known as an advocate for working-class Israelis and an opponent of privatization and cuts to public services and welfare.[5] He founded One Nation, also known as Am Echad, before the 1999 Knesset election; the party merged with Labor in mid-2004.[1] His confrontations with Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s privatization and welfare-cut policies helped establish his political profile before his campaign for the Labor leadership.[1]

Peretz called for Labor to return to a social-democratic, progressive orientation, emphasizing social justice, antipoverty programs and welfare.[5] Leaving Sharon’s Likud-led coalition was part of that platform.[5] His domestic proposals included comprehensive school reform, a minimum wage of $1,000 a month, higher pensions and a guaranteed pension for every citizen, alongside a pledge not to introduce new taxes.[4] He also advocated increased government subsidies for mortgages and pensions.[3] These proposals addressed a social setting in which approximately 30 percent of Israeli children and nearly 20 percent of Israelis lived below the poverty line.[3]

In the week before the primary, Labor had 100,474 eligible voters.[7] A Teleseker poll put Peres at 40 percent, Peretz at 25.5 percent, Matan Vilna’i at 14.5 percent and Ben-Eliezer at 8.8 percent.[7] A separate Dahaf poll suggested that turnout could determine whether Peres reached the 40 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff.[7] Peres’s campaign urged Vilna’i and Ben-Eliezer to leave the race, but both resisted that pressure at the time.[7]

Organization was an important feature of Peretz’s campaign: he registered more than 20,000 new voters and used trade-union mobilization techniques to bring supporters to the polls.[3] Peres did not register additional voters.[3] About two weeks before the election, figures in Peres’s campaign expressed concern that their election-day organization was weaker than Peretz’s, despite their candidate’s lead in opinion polls.[8] Peretz’s camp presented his candidacy as an opportunity to revive Labor and attract voters disillusioned with Likud.[8]

Coalition membership remained an issue even on election day.[9] Peres said Labor had made too many compromises within the government and would have to draw conclusions if government policy did not change.[9] He proposed meeting Sharon to press for changes in government conduct and priorities, while emphasizing that he was not issuing an ultimatum.[9]

Voting took place on Wednesday, November 9.[1] By 8 p.m., approximately 55 percent of roughly 100,000 eligible members had voted.[10] After Peres’s campaign requested an extension, the election committee extended voting only until 8:30 p.m.[10] Election-day reporting put turnout at 60–65 percent; a subsequent account gave turnout among dues-paying Labor members as 64 percent.[10][3]

The exit polls offered sharply different predictions.[10] A Maagar Mochot poll for Kol Israel placed Peretz ahead with 46 percent, followed by Peres with 41 percent and Ben-Eliezer with 13 percent.[10] A Smith Institute poll for Army Radio instead gave Peres 52 percent, Peretz 38 percent and Ben-Eliezer 10 percent.[10] The Kol Israel survey had 667 respondents and a reported margin of error of 5 percent.[10] Peres’s personal campaign chief nevertheless expressed confidence in victory on the basis of preliminary results.[10]

During the overnight count, the displayed tally continued to show Peres ahead until 3:48 a.m., although early returns from several towns had suggested that the lead could change.[11] At 5:20 a.m. on Thursday, November 10, Labor Secretary-General Eitan Cabel declared Peretz the winner.[11] The official percentages were 42.35 percent for Peretz, 39.96 percent for Peres and 15.82 percent for Ben-Eliezer.[2] The final report listed 27,098 votes for Peres and 10,764 for Ben-Eliezer.[11] The party election committee declared Peretz both Labor chairman and its candidate for prime minister.[2]

In his victory speech, Peretz said he would consult party officials and lawmakers about notifying Sharon that Labor wanted to leave the government.[2] He presented withdrawal as part of making Labor an alternative capable of winning power at the next election, and called for unity and an end to internal factionalism.[2] He also appealed directly to Peres to stay, saying, “Shimon, don’t leave us alone,” and expressing his wish to have Peres beside him.[2] Peretz linked the victory to addressing poverty, children’s sense of belonging and the treatment of older people.[2]

Before the election, Labor faced a contentious dispute over alleged forged membership forms and whether its membership roll should be rechecked before the primary.[12] At a June 2005 central committee meeting, Communications Minister Dalia Itzik was struck in the leg during a disturbance, and security personnel escorted Peretz and his ally Adisu Massala from the auditorium.[12] The accusations of forgery and improper admission of members were allegations made by participants, not established findings.[12] The primary was subsequently postponed amid irregularities in a large new-member registration drive.[13]

During the overnight count, approximately 1,100 votes from Sderot and Mitzpe Ramon were initially reported as uncounted and under examination by the party election committee.[14] Peres challenged the result over alleged irregularities in those locations, while his campaign sought an injunction preventing publication of the official results.[2] The request for an injunction was rejected, as were challenges to three polling stations.[2] Cabel said no complaint requiring the election committee to convene had been submitted during the day or after counting, apart from an allegation that two people had voted for others in Sderot.[2] He also stated that Peretz would have won even if all the polling stations challenged by Peres had been disqualified.[11]

Peretz immediately called for early parliamentary elections and Labor’s withdrawal from the government.[4] Three days after his selection, most Labor ministers were describing departure as a “done deal,” while stressing that a formal decision remained the responsibility of party institutions.[15] Relations between Peretz and Sharon also became strained after Sharon postponed a planned meeting with him.[15]

On November 20, Labor voted to leave the coalition, depriving Sharon of his parliamentary majority.[4] The following day, Sharon left Likud and formed Kadima.[4] The sequence also involved Sharon asking the president to dissolve the government before establishing the new party.[16] Labor’s withdrawal and Sharon’s response contributed to the move toward an early general election in March 2006.[4]

Despite Peretz’s appeal for him to remain, Peres subsequently left Labor and joined Sharon’s Kadima.[17] Peretz resigned as Histadrut chairman after winning the Labor leadership and concentrated on his campaign to become prime minister.[5]

Labor’s new leadership advanced a socioeconomic platform while also setting out positions on negotiations and territorial policy.[4] Peretz promised to remove illegal outposts and stop funding settlement expansion, redirecting resources toward socioeconomic programs and development in the Negev and Galilee.[4] He opposed granting Palestinian refugees a right of return to Israel and supported Jerusalem remaining Israel’s capital with borders that preserved a Jewish majority.[4] He initially called the Road Map “a waste of our time,” but subsequently amended his position by advocating the introduction of new content into that framework.[4]

Campaign-finance reporting in January 2006 identified several contributors to Peres’s leadership campaign, including Vladimir Gusinsky, who gave NIS 35,000, as well as Haim Saban, Bruce Rappaport and Daniel Abrams.[18] The same report listed contributions to the Labor Party under Peretz, including NIS 10,000 each from contractor Igal Ahuvi and businessman Benny Gaon.[18]

Peretz’s victory brought an unusually strong labor and socioeconomic profile to the leadership of a major Israeli party.[3] Born in Morocco in 1952, Peretz immigrated with his family to Israel, where they lived in a transit camp that became Sderot.[1] He became the first Sephardic or Mizrahi Israeli to lead one of the country’s two major parties into an election.[3] He also had virtually no background in national security or foreign policy, an unusual profile for a candidate for prime minister.[3]

His electoral strategy sought to attract lower-income Sephardic voters who had often supported Likud, emphasizing his background and familiarity with economic disadvantage.[3] That appeal addressed voters whose identification with Likud involved not only economic circumstances but also hawkish foreign-policy preferences, resentment over the treatment of immigrant parents by Labor’s older leadership, and affinity with Likud’s traditionalist Jewish cultural identity.[3] Labor parliamentarian Yuli Tamir anticipated that Peretz would emphasize economic differences with other parties while playing down foreign-policy differences with Sharon.[3]

The subsequent national campaign reflected Labor’s renewed emphasis on social and economic questions.[19] A November 2005 poll found that 52 percent of voters named socioeconomic considerations as the principal factor in their voting decisions, compared with 27 percent who identified security-political issues.[19] A study of media coverage cited in a later analysis found that 20.3 percent of items concerned education, health, welfare and social justice, compared with 11.5 percent concerning terror, attacks, the intifada and security, and 13 percent concerning Palestinians and negotiations.[19]

A December 2005 headline on the Labor newspaper website declared, “Labor is the only party that presents a real social alternative.”[19] Peretz’s prominence among poor and working-class voters grew from his opposition to privatization and welfare cuts, while his leadership brought greater public attention to social inequality and the circumstances of disadvantaged Israelis.[5] The leadership contest thus preceded both Labor’s effort to present a social-democratic alternative and a national political realignment involving the creation of Kadima.[20]