Shas chairman Arye Deri orders sweeping internal review after party's steep election losses

Shas chairman Arye Deri has set in motion an extended effort to rebuild the Sephardi haredi party, opening with a deep internal investigation into the causes of its electoral collapse, Walla reported on Friday. The recent elections left the party with roughly half of its former political strength.

According to the report, Deri gathered party representatives last week, among them officials working at the municipal level, and gave each of them an assignment. Within approximately one week, every representative is expected to hand in detailed figures on the election outcome in their own area of responsibility, together with an analysis of what drove the decline and proposals for the road ahead.

Deri made clear to those present that he had no patience for reports that soften reality or minimize the magnitude of the loss. Instead, he demanded the sharpest and most painful conclusions they could reach, arguing that an honest confrontation with the reasons for the defeat is the only way the party can start to recover.

In practice, the move amounts to an internal commission of inquiry into how a party long regarded as one of the most effective electoral machines in Israeli politics produced such a weak result.

For years, the Shas grassroots apparatus was counted among the party's greatest assets. It operates a wide network of activists and representatives in nearly every city and stronghold tied to the movement, in part through a structure known as commanders of tens and commanders of thousands. That same machinery, which for years was used to bring voters to the polls on Election Day, is now being harnessed to dissect the failure and extract lessons from it.

Party representatives are expected to start laying their data and conclusions before Deri in the coming days. Yet some inside Shas argue the answers are already evident. "We became a branch of Peleg Yerushalmi (Jerusalem Faction)," a party source told Walla. "Rabbis were dragged along by Ashkenazi [spiritual leaders], there was hysteria surrounding the military draft issue, the rhetoric became increasingly extreme, and we were drawn further and further toward the extremist ultra-Orthodox camp. The ultra-Orthodox Shas took over the movement, while traditional Shas simply disappeared."

The source added that the party's late attempt during the campaign to reach out to traditional Jewish voters arrived too late to matter. "You can't put two videos featuring soldiers into a campaign and think that will undo four years of damage. Traditional voters saw where we were heading, heard the statements, and felt that the movement no longer represented them."

Within the party there is a widening recognition that the loss was not simply the product of a poorly run campaign but points to a deeper crisis over Shas's identity and its voter base. The central dilemma now before Deri is whether the movement can draw back the traditional voters who have drifted away without shedding its ultra-Orthodox core.

"This isn't something you can fix in a single day," the source concluded. "The damage has been building for years. Now we need to begin a long process of rebuilding."