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Democrats party leader Yair Golan and MK Naama Lazimi at the party headquarters after the Israeli election, Tuesday. Credit: Hadas Parush
Democrats party leader Yair Golan and MK Naama Lazimi at the party headquarters after the Israeli election, Tuesday. Credit: Hadas Parush
The Democrats ultimately won eight seats: short of expectations, but double the representation of Labor in the outgoing Knesset. In the 2022 election, Labor and Meretz – the two parties that later merged to form the Democrats – ran separately. Labor won only four seats, while Meretz failed to cross the electoral threshold.
Still, the party appears to have fallen short in reaching voters it had neglected, particularly Arab citizens. During the Knesset term, Democrats lawmakers Naama Lazimi, Efrat Rayten and Gilad Kariv stood out for their parliamentary work, while during the campaign the party’s candidates traveled extensively around the country. Kariv was particularly active in reaching Arab communities, and the party recruited a large volunteer network.
But Soumaya Bashir, the party’s representative from the Arab community, finished only 10th in the primary, and the Democrats won only small shares of the vote in many of Israel’s larger Arab localities.
Issawi Frej, a former Meretz minister and lawmaker, does not consider the Democrats’ result a significant achievement. “The Democrats were never genuinely interested in partnership with Arab society. It was a pretense,” he charged.