Yair Golan

Yair Golan brings a rare combination for the Israeli left to the 2026 election: a reserve major general and former IDF deputy chief of staff who heads the main left-wing party. His public image was shaped by a few sharp moments. In a 2016 Holocaust Remembrance Day speech, as deputy chief of staff, he said he could identify signs in Israel of processes that had taken place in Europe, and especially in Germany, 70 to 90 years earlier, and then-defense minister Moshe Ya'alon publicly backed him; on October 7, 2023, he drove his private car to the Gaza border area and rescued survivors from around the Nova festival site. In May 2024 he was elected Labor leader and led its merger with Meretz into The Democrats, in whose online primary this year some 86% of party members voted. On the other hand, his May 2025 remark that a sane country "does not kill babies as a hobby" drew condemnation from the coalition and the opposition alike, and he insisted his words were aimed at the government, not at soldiers. In the current campaign he rules out sitting in a government with Netanyahu and the Haredi parties and says an Arab party could be part of the next government, and in September he signed a pledge with Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid and Avigdor Lieberman to work together and refrain from attacking one another. Netanyahu's camp uses his comments about the Arab parties to argue that Eisenkot would be unable to form a government without them. Opinion of him splits between those who see him as a courageous security voice and those who see him as an extremist, and October 27 will test how much weight the camp he leads carries.