Ever since Avi Gabbay came from nowhere and won the Israeli Labour Party leadership race on July 10, commentators in Israel and abroad have been calling him “the Israeli Macron”.
In private, however, Mr Gabbay has said he is looking for inspiration on the other side of the English Channel, from another formerly anonymous politician who surprisingly became Labour leader 23 years ago this month: Tony Blair.
While Mr Macron formed a new centrist party in France, vanquishing the old parties of left and right on his way to the Elysée Palace, Mr Gabbay’s situation is much more reminiscent of that which faced the then newly elected leader of the Labour Party in 1994.
At that time, Labour had gone 15 years without holding office. A similar period has passed since the last Israeli Labour prime minister, Ehud Barak, lost to a Likud challenger.
Mr Gabbay has been studying the Blair strategy closely and believes his party should adopt two of the central tenets of the New Labour project — to move away from its left-wing image to the centre of the political map and to transform the party machine into an election-fighting platform. Israeli Labour has now lost six consecutive elections and Mr Gabbay has already made the tactical decision to spend the next few weeks and months meeting voters in Likud territory — outside the Tel Aviv urban area — rather than shoring up the party’s old base.
He believes centre-left voters who, according to the polls, deserted Labour for Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid, will return the moment they believe Labour is a viable alternative once again.
Surveys indicate that it is already working — Mr Gabbay’s Labour has already overtaken Yesh Atid in the polls, back in its traditional second place.
That, however, will not be enough to beat Benjamin Netanyahu. Since Mr Netanyahu returned to power in 2009, the right-wing-religious bloc has held a small but firm majority.
For any Labour candidate to become prime minister, bringing the voters home from Yesh Atid will not be enough: he will also have to shift two per cent of the right-leaning electorate to the centre-left bloc.
