ISAAC HERZOG
Until as recently as 2013, Isaac Herzog was a second-rank politician seen by almost nobody as a future prime minister. In that year, he became leader of the Labour party and the polls suggest that he now stands on the brink of defeating Benjamin Netanyahu.
Mr Herzog has benefited from a makeover designed to spruce up his nerdish appearance and improve his high-pitched speaking voice.
He may not look like a leader, but Mr Herzog comes from the aristocracy of Israeli politics. His father, Chaim, was the sixth president of Israel and his grandfather was Chief Rabbi. Mr Herzog, known by his nickname “Bougie”, was born in 1960 and served as an intelligence officer in Unit 8200, Israel’s answer to GCHQ. He entered the Knesset in 2003 and spent four years as social affairs minister. He has taken Labour into an alliance with a centrist party led by a former rival, Tzipi Livni, to create the Zionist Union. If this bloc wins enough seats to lead the next government, Mr Herzog will be prime minister for the first half of the four-year term, handing over to Ms Livni for the second half.
TZIPI LIVNI
Tzipi Livni began her political career as a member of Likud and a follower of Benjamin Netanyahu, before becoming one of his fiercest opponents.
Like her ally, Mr Herzog, she is an aristocrat of Israeli politics, the daughter of a senior commander in the Irgun, the Jewish underground that helped to bomb the British out of Palestine in the 1940s. Born in 1958, Ms Livni began her career as an intelligence officer in the Mossad, Israel’s version of MI6. She later entered the Knesset as a member of Likud and a protégé of Ariel Sharon, then a hardline prime minister.
But Ms Livni became less hawkish in office, supporting the withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and leaving Likud to join the centrist Kadima party and, later, to form her own Hatnuah movement. Along the way, she served as foreign minister and agreed to join Mr Netanyahu’s coalition as justice minister in 2013. But the two became bitter rivals, leading Mr Netanyahu to remove her from office last year. Ms Livni, fiercely ambitious and outspoken, stands to become prime minister for the second half of a four-year term if Zionist Union wins the election.