Yesh Atid MK Orna Barbivai to challenge veteran mayor Ron Huldai in Tel Aviv race

Centrist opposition lawmaker Orna Barbivai will challenge longtime Tel Aviv mayor Ron Huldai for city leadership in the fall, a spokesperson for Barbivai’s Yesh Atid party said on Tuesday.

A former economy minister and military general, Barbivai was set to launch her long-rumored candidacy on Wednesday night. She is expected to resign from the parliament at the beginning of August, after the current Knesset session wraps up, the Yesh Atid spokesperson said.

Huldai has headed the Tel Aviv municipality since 1998, and will seek his sixth consecutive five-year term on October 31, when municipal elections will be held across Israel.

Yesh Atid has held a dominant spot in centrist national politics since emerging onto the scene in 2012, but has yet to translate its Knesset success into municipal control.

In recent years, the party has invested considerable resources into building its municipal elections strategy, and Tel Aviv would be a significant jump from its current wins in smaller cities like Hadera and Arad.

Born in the northern city of Afula to Iraqi and Romanian immigrant parents, Barbivai, 60, rose to national prominence for being the first woman to be appointed to a slew of senior military appointments. In 2011, she was tapped to run the military’s Manpower Directorate, as the first woman to hold the rank of major general in the Israel Defense Forces.

File: Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai speaks during a protest march as part of International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women in Tel Aviv, November 24, 2022. (Tomer Neuberg/Flash90)

In 2019, Barbivai entered the Knesset for Yesh Atid, as part of its then-alliance with the Blue and White party, which today forms part of Benny Gantz’s National Unity party. She served as economy minister from 2021 to 2022, during the short-lived government co-led by Yesh Atid party head Yair Lapid. Barbivai is also a member of Yesh Atid’s negotiating team that had been sitting down with coalition representatives in an attempt to find a compromise solution for reforming the judiciary before talks completely froze last week.

Lapid, currently the opposition leader, backs Barbivai’s candidacy and will be alongside her at Wednesday’s launch event.

Huldai, 78, also formerly a career military officer, joined politics a decade after retiring from the Air Force with the rank of brigadier general.

He was first elected to lead Tel Aviv in 1998 with One Tel Aviv, a list affiliated with the Labor party, and briefly planned to run for the Knesset in 2021 under the banner of The Israelis, a quickly shelved party he founded.

Huldai has successfully fought off challenges from national politicians in the past, including former lawmakers Dov Khenin and Nitzan Horowitz, and from former deputy mayor Asaf Zamir, who later briefly served as an MK.

Earlier in June, Huldai’s then-deputy Reuven Ladianski announced his campaign for the mayoralty, saying that “this is Huldai’s worst term, the city is falling apart.”

Huldai promptly fired Ladianski, citing a breakdown of trust between the two.

Tel Aviv is Israel’s financial and economic center, and with a population of 470,000, the second largest Israeli city after Jerusalem.