Zionist Home chair Chili Tropper folded his party into election frontrunner Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party on Sunday, after terminating his short-lived alliance with Yoaz Hendel’s Reservists party, two days before the deadline for parties to submit their candidate lists for the October 27 election.
Tropper will now be placed in the sixth spot on the Yashar Knesset slate, while his Zionist Home colleagues, bereaved family members Shira Shapira and Elyasaf Peretz, will receive realistic spots further down the list. According to various reports, Shapira is expected to be placed tenth on the list, and Peretz will be placed either in the 20th or 21st spot.
The alliance will be a complete merger rather than a technical agreement, meaning Tropper will not be able to split his faction off from Yashar once elected.
Tropper, who stepped down from Benny Gantz’s Blue and White in May, joined forces with Hendel this summer and established the Zionist Home-Reservists just last month, with the stated goal of helping establish as broad a “Zionist government” as possible. But the party failed to rise in the polls and was hovering around the 3.25% electoral threshold.
Both Tropper and Hendel have said they won’t agree to be included in a government that relies on the Arab Ra’am party, but some reports said Eisenkot wasn’t interested in joining forces with Hendel due to fear the latter won’t accept a minority government propped up externally by Ra’am — indicating that Tropper may be open to such a possibility.
