Former Labor party chairperson MK Shelly Yechimovich (Zionist Union) on Thursday voiced sharp criticism of the prospect of her leftist party joining Likud’s coalition in a unity government, and claimed she alone was responsible for blocking the merger.

“This is a proposal that should have been rejected with contempt a long time ago. Unfortunately that didn’t happen,” she said, in criticism of her successor and party head Opposition chairperson Yitzhak Herzog, who until Thursday kept silent on the reports.

“In internal conversations I expressed my position in words that are many times sharper and sting more than what I’m writing here, and in effect I simply prevented this mistake,” Yechimovich wrote in a paper distributed to her activists.

Criticizing the prospect of joining with Likud, she said, “this isn’t a unity government. It’s a right-wing government to all intents and purposes, with the Labor partly crawling after it with no conditions (only) in order to receive portfolios and honorary roles.”

She described the proposed Labor role as “a big reverberating nothing which is entirely sewn up in order not to anger the most right-wing party in the Knesset – Jewish Home.”

Yechimovich’s claims of single-handedly blocking the union come the same day Herzog claimed he has received numerous requests to join a unity government but held out and didn’t accept them, because they did not meet his conditions of “holding the steering wheel.”

He listed his conditions as including being allowed to conduct the unilateral establishment of a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria, and “to cast to the winds all the despicable racist legislation.”

Responding to reports of his impending political demise and dwindling influence, Herzog claimed his party is “on the verge of taking power.”