Shas chairman Arye Deri calls for internal examination into party's election failure

Shas chairman Arye Deri has decided to launch a lengthy process of rebuilding the Sephardi haredi (ultra-Orthodox) party, beginning with a thorough internal examination of the reasons behind its electoral failure, after the recent elections saw the party lose roughly half its political strength, Walla learned on Friday.Last week, Deri convened party representatives, including officials from the municipal level, and assigned them a task: Within approximately one week, each representative must submit detailed data on the election results in their area of responsibility, along with an analysis of the reasons for the party's decline and recommendations for the future.Deri stressed to those attending that he was not interested in reports that sugarcoat reality or attempts to downplay the scale of the defeat. On the contrary, he asked for the harshest, most pointed, and most painful conclusions, recognizing that only by genuinely confronting the reasons for the loss could the party begin to recover.In effect, Deri is establishing a kind of internal "commission of inquiry" to understand how one of the most effective electoral machines in Israeli politics ended up with such a poor result.Shas organizational network harnessed to analyze election defeatFor years, Shas's grassroots organization was considered one of its greatest strengths.