The runoff primary elections of the Machane Tzioni party were held and the new party leader is Avi Gabbai, who won with 52% of the vote as compared to Amir Peretz, with 47%. Gabbai is an outsider presently, as he is not a MK. Machane Tzioni is the former Labor party.
Gabbai, who was born in Yerushalayim, is not a stranger to the Knesset however. With a MBA from Hebrew University, he worked in the Finance Ministry for four years in his younger years, then moving to Bezeq as assistant CEO, only to become CEO in the future.
He was a founding member of the Kulanu party, and was appointed Minister of Environmental Affairs. However, he objected to the appointment of Avigdor Lieberman as Defense Minister, and in May 2016, he resigned in protest.
In December 2016, he joined Machane Tzioni and announced he would run for the leadership position. Some of the mainstream news commentators report they believe he won because he is the only candidate that was not the leader of the party in the past so he represents fresh hope for Machane Tzioni voters.
(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
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One Response
He’s Sefardi with proper academic credentials, and got his credentials through hard work. He worked in the corporate world, not as a labor union hack, unlike Peretz. Unlike Herzog, he has no yichus, or ties to past failures. He has some similarities to the new French president, who came to power with a new center-left party that for all purposes wiped out the existing socialist party.