Despite a last-minute round of negotiations on Thursday to discuss the possibility of a joint ticket with Meretz, Labor Party leader Avi Gabbay informed Meretz leader Tamar Zandberg on Thursday afternoon that a merger was off the table and Labor and Meretz would be running in the Knesset election separately.
On Thursday morning, following the news that Israel Resilience under Benny Gantz and Yesh Atid had agreed on a merger with a rotating leadership, Zandberg stepped up her calls for a Meretz-Labor joint ticket.
"Given the merger on the Center-Left, now is the time for the Left to unite to form a center-left government. Meretz will leave no stone unturned to make that happen. We have 12 hours, and we invite Avi Gabbay to the negotiating table immediately," Zandberg said.
Later Thursday, Gabbay told Zandberg that based on Labor's analysis, "both parties are stable, and there is nothing to fear."
"I think that the whole would be smaller than the sum of its parts," Gabbay told Zandberg, despite the pressure from many Labor members to run on a joint ticket with Meretz.
Zandberg said in response to Gabbay's decision that "sadly, Gabbay claimed that he doesn't see the great opportunity and that there are procedural difficulties for the Labor party [in a merger]."
Associates of Gabbay said that "after an in-depth look at things in the Labor party, we saw that the combination of the two movements won't increase our strength, but rather the opposite – it would weaken the bloc.
"Meretz will definitely pass the minimum electoral threshold and its representatives will certainly be in the next Knesset. We'll run separately and help each other to bring about a change of government," Gabbay's people said.
The Labor members said that Gabbay had offered Zandberg a surplus votes agreement.
Surplus votes agreements allow two parties to combine the votes they receive in excess of their initially allotted seats in the Knesset. If these combined surplus votes amount to an extra seat, it goes to the party with the greater number of surplus votes. Such agreements are typically made between parties that are ideologically aligned, for the purpose of retaining excess votes within their political camp and maximizing their Knesset representation.
