ראובן קופיצ'ינסקי · CC BY-SA 4.0

Yuli Edelstein spent years as a Soviet refusenik before emigrating to Israel, where he co-founded the Yisrael BaAliyah party and became a senior Likud figure, serving in the Knesset since 1996. He held some of Israeli politics' most prominent posts — Speaker of the Knesset, Minister of Health during the pandemic years, and chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee — before breaking with Likud in 2026 to co-found a new party, Unity, with Gilad Erdan.