Erdan pulls Unity party out of Israel's election after talks fail

Update, 4 September, 21:08 Israel time

Gilad Erdan has announced that the Unity party will not contest the election at all, hours after the collapse of merger talks with Benny Gantz. Ynet reported that Erdan cited the party's failure in the polls and the breakdown of the contacts with Blue and White, saying that the reality shows a large majority of the public wants above all a clear decision on who will be prime minister, and that the need for a broad unity government is not high on the list of priorities.

In a statement circulated by the journalist Amit Segal, Erdan said he had founded the party weeks earlier in the belief that Israel needed a broad Zionist government able to pass a genuine conscription law and resolve disputes, and that after about a month of campaigning he had concluded otherwise. News.co.il carried the same announcement.

Ynet named Yuli Edelstein, Oren Smadja and Aliza Bloch among those who had joined the list Erdan headed. It also quoted Gadi Eisenkot saying in a message directed at Gantz that every party on the edge of the electoral threshold should act as Erdan has, and Gantz speaking of forming a Zionist government that crosses the blocs.

The Jerusalem Post reported the withdrawal as following the failed merger talks. None of the reports says whether Erdan or others on his slate will join another list before the filing deadline.

The story as first reported

Negotiations to merge two small parties ahead of Israel's coming election have ended without a deal. Ynet reported that Blue and White, headed by Benny Gantz, and the Unity party, headed by Gilad Erdan, will not run on a joint list, ending days of contacts between the two camps.

Journalist Amit Segal, citing figures in Blue and White, reported that the decision came at the end of a further meeting between the two men, at which Gantz informed Erdan that there would be no union of the parties. The Times of Israel, citing Hebrew media, wrote that the talks appear to have fallen apart, and noted that Gantz said he was not interested in joining the two parties together.

Why the timing matters: the slate deadline

Israeli elections are run on closed national lists. Each party files a finalised, ordered slate of candidates with the Central Elections Committee, and once the filing window shuts the list cannot be reshuffled or fused with another party's list. That makes the final hours before the deadline the moment when mergers either happen or do not.

The Times of Israel reported that slates for the October 7 election must be submitted by Tuesday evening. Several parties that polls suggest are unlikely to clear the bar for entering the Knesset, Israel's parliament, have been holding late merger discussions before that cut-off.

The electoral threshold problem

Israel's system requires a party to win a minimum share of the national vote to receive any seats at all. Votes for lists that fall short are discarded, which is why small parties on the same side of the political map are routinely pressed to combine rather than risk cancelling each other out.

Ynet reported that neither Blue and White nor Unity is currently crossing the threshold in polling, and that some assessments held that even a combined list would not have got over the hurdle. That assessment is one of the few pieces of analysis the reports offer for why the two sides were not able to reach terms.

The recriminations

The clearest disagreement in the material is over who wanted the merger. Figures in Erdan's Unity party issued a statement, quoted by Segal, complaining about the briefings Blue and White gave to journalists at the moment Erdan left the meeting. Those briefings, the Unity figures said, show "who really wanted unity and who was only interested in getting prominence in the media." They added that Blue and White never tried to discuss substantive issues and would not go all the way to a union that would bring the bloc together.

Ynet carried the same line, reporting that Erdan's party jabbed that it was now possible to see who had only been after media attention. No comparable statement from Gantz or from Blue and White is quoted in any of the reports, beyond the unnamed party figures who described the outcome of the meeting.

How the story moved

The collapse was first put out on Hebrew-language news channels. Barak Ravid of Axios posted in Hebrew that the merger contacts had failed at the end of a further meeting, crediting Segal. News.co.il circulated the same account of Blue and White figures describing Gantz's decision. Ynet's news alerts channel then reported that Erdan and Gantz had decided not to run together, followed minutes later by Erdan's criticism of Gantz.

What the reports do not say

The material does not give the polling figures for either party, the level of the electoral threshold, or the number of seats either list is projected to win. It does not say where or when the final meeting between Gantz and Erdan took place, who else was in the room, or what specific terms were on the table, such as the order of candidates or which of the two would have headed a joint list.

Nothing in the reports indicates whether either party is still pursuing a merger with a different list before the filing deadline, or whether either leader is considering not running. The accounts of the meeting's outcome rest on unnamed figures in Blue and White, and the criticism of Gantz rests on unnamed figures in Unity. Neither Gantz nor Erdan is quoted by name in any of the reports.