For four months, Yaïr Lapid has been a suspended prime minister. Without a majority, it manages current affairs until the legislative elections of 1er november. No poll gives him the winner. His reign, the shortest in the history of Israel, is for the moment only a parenthesis in a bottomless political crisis, which has already produced four elections since April 2019.
However, Mr. Lapid keeps repeating to those around him that he does not have to win: he just has to prevent Binyamin Netanyahu from winning one last time. He would then prove that the majority of “King Bibi” has definitely vanished. For or against Mr Netanyahu: Israel has been mired in trench warfare for four years, while his corruption trial has been ongoing since May 2020.
Withdrawal from political life
In June 2021, Mr. Lapid managed to break this balance, by bringing together a coalition of eight parties. Their experience was cut short. The coalition was shattered in the summer of 2022. Naftali Bennett, the leader of a small far-right religious formation, to whom Mr. Lapid had left the head of government for a time to take charge of foreign affairs, s’ is withdrawn from political life, burned, bitter.
At the head of the centrist party Yesh Atid (“There is a future”), which he founded in 2012, Mr. Lapid is an admirer of Emmanuel Macron, whom he has visited twice in a year. He wants to be a guardian of the democratic order against “to dark, illiberal forces” unleashed, according to him, by Mr. Netanyahu and his ” block “ of ultra-Orthodox allies and Jewish supremacists. He sees their promise to reform the judiciary as “an attack, carried out with the ambition to dismantle and destroy it”. He sees it as a way for the supporters of the settlements to break the dam that limits their expansion and, for the allies of Mr. Netanyahu, to put an end to his trial.
Embody a form of “normalcy”
Since the summer, this former journalist and television star has striven to embody a form of “normality” in power. His adviser, polling expert Mark Mellman, linked to the American Democratic Party, convinced him that a majority of Israelis do not want to see their prime minister on the screen every night. They want competent, efficient and peaceful power. Of which act. Mr Lapid only launched his campaign two weeks before the poll.
His record is not meager. To Israelis on the right, who are concerned about security, he points to the military operation carried out in Gaza in August against the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He makes a big deal of the maritime border agreement with Lebanon, signed on Thursday, which will allow Israel to exploit the Karish gas field. He said that all the heads of the security organs approved of this “deal”. Mr. Netanyahu sees in this an abandonment of sovereignty and a demonstration of weakness in the face of Lebanese Hezbollah. But he no longer suggests that he will bury him if he returns to power. Mr. Lapid finally congratulates himself for having moderated galloping inflation and for having put an end to a teachers’ strike.
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