On Saturday morning, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid tweeted a photo of himself with a birthday cake. It wasn’t his birthday. That was two months ago, when he turned 58. The cake – actually, there were two of them in the shape of numerals – was for the 10th anniversary of his announcement on January 8, 2012, that he was leaving journalism to found a new political party: Yesh Atid.
The date of the founding of a new party is a rather mundane occasion in democracies (not so in dictatorships, where ruling parties celebrate their founding with much pomp and grandeur), but for Lapid it remains a matter of great significance.
In an emotional, schmaltz-laden Facebook post, he recalled the momentous day 10 years ago on which he informed his family he was about to take the plunge, and wrote at length about all that had befallen him and his supporters since.
It’s easy to make fun of Lapid’s self-reverential celebration, but the truth is it’s not aimed at political pundits. Israeli protocol dictates that ministers refrain from making public appearances or statements during Shabbat, but this wasn’t Lapid speaking as foreign minister or alternate prime minister. He could, of course, have waited until the evening, after Shabbat ended, but this was a personal communication from him to the party faithful, his extended family. And Shabbat morning for the secular, urban, middle class people who constitute Yesh Atid’s core constituency is family time. This was exactly the right time to reach out to them. Among friends and family.
But actually, Yesh Atid’s 10th anniversary is an important occasion – and not just for Lapid’s die-hard supporters. It’s a milestone in Israeli politics where the middle ground is littered with the makeshift graves of centrist parties that rocketed in one election amid predictions they would be the game-changer breaking the right-left divide, only to have their new lawmakers fall out with each other in the next Knesset and then fall out of favor with the public and quickly disappear in the next election.
Dash (the Democratic Movement for Change), Kadima and Kulanu are just three prime examples. And then there’s Shinui, the anti-clerical party that existed in various minor iterations since the 1970s and then suddenly, under the leadership of Yosef Lapid (Yair Lapid’s father), jumped to first six and then 15 lawmakers in the elections of 1999 and 2003, only to be torn apart by infighting and disappear by 2006.
Shinui was the forerunner of Yesh Atid. In the six years following its implosion, Lapid Jr. closely studied his father’s mistakes, as well as those of other centrist parties. His chief lesson was that if he wanted his own party to survive, he needed to remain in sole control of its institutions and slate of candidates. The other lesson was that while as centrists they should appeal to traditional voters of both left- and right-wing parties, Likud is much more difficult to crack. Its members are fiercely tribal and loyal to their leaders. Lapid still dreams of winning them over, but his party would have to be built on left-leaning voters.
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For the past decade, he has steadfastly clung to those principles. While presenting himself as the consummate democrat, his absolute hold on the party apparatus would put North Korea’s Kim dynasty to shame. No one in the party is too prominent to lose their position once they get too big for their boots. That includes former Shin Bet security service chief Jacob Perry, ex-Education Minister Shay Piron and even Lapid’s closest collaborator and chief party enforcer, Ofer Shelah, who all found themselves out of a job.
Shelah’s departure was particularly poignant. He was forced out in late 2020 after daring to demand the party hold leadership primaries. Lapid adopted the idea, but only after Shelah was gone. By then the message was clear and no one stood against him.
With the party’s stability and his primacy ensured, Lapid has been free to target his key audience, with tightly controlled campaigns and messages calibrated for him by U.S. Democratic pollster Mark Mellman.
Foreign Minister Yair Lapid with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett during a cabinet meeting in Jerusalem last month.Gil Cohen-Magen/AP
Lapid has yet to make Yesh Atid Israel’s largest party, and as long as Benjamin Netanyahu remains Likud’s leader he is unlikely to do so. But in 10 years he has taken full advantage of the succession of weak and unpopular Labor leaders to permanently relegate the party that founded and ruled Israel for half its existence to a single digit number of lawmakers.
Labor’s current leaders admit in private that they don’t see a way back for the party as long as Lapid remains on the scene. And he’s showing no sign of going anywhere, as his 10th anniversary celebration makes abundantly clear.
Yesh Atid has confounded Lapid’s many critics by becoming a fixture on the political scene and with the exception of Shas, which was founded in 1983, is now the oldest party in the Knesset without roots in the pre-state era.
This survival is all the more remarkable for Yesh Atid making it through its merger with Benny Gantz‘s Kahol Lavan in early 2019. At the time, it looked as if Lapid had no choice but to sacrifice his party and personal ambitions to allow Gantz a clear run at taking Netanyahu down. From main star at his own party, he was demoted to supporting a cast of three senior generals (Gantz and fellow former IDF chiefs of staff Moshe Ya’alon and Gabi Ashkenazi), in whose presence he often looked like the quartermaster sergeant.
But when the gaunt general faltered 18 months later, going into coalition with Netanyahu, Lapid refused to capitulate and emerged as the leader of the opposition, with his own party still around him.
Since that day in March 2020 when he refused to go along with Gantz, Lapid has barely put a foot wrong. After biding his time until the inevitable failure of the Netanyahu-Gantz governing coalition, he ran an immaculate election campaign, reestablishing Yesh Atid as the second-largest party but not pressing the other opposition parties too hard, so that they all crossed the election threshold and didn’t waste votes. Then, over the course of nearly three laborious months, he patiently constructed the impossible coalition of right-wing, centrist, Islamist and left-wing parties that became possible only through his relinquishing of the prime minister’s job to Naftali Bennett.
But it’s not just his political sophistication. Something also seems to have changed in Lapid’s personality during this period. The dismal saga with Gantz taught him a valuable lesson in humility, and with it came a new sense of gravitas transforming the dilettante into a responsible grown-up.
Is that enough to keep Yesh Atid on the road for another decade?
Lapid is now on the threshold of the prime minister’s office. If the coalition he built sticks together for another 19 months, he is scheduled to replace Bennett on August 27, 2023. But that’s no longer enough. Lapid may be on track to become Israel’s 14th president next year, but by the time he enters office the Knesset will already be counting down to the next election in 2025. Lapid’s rivals will be anxious to give him as short a period as possible to establish himself as a credible long-term leader.
And he still hasn’t acquired that status. None of the polls carried out since the last election give Yesh Atid more than 20 seats in the next Knesset. Lapid is now at the height of his popularity, but only some 25 percent of Israelis think he’s a better candidate for prime minister than Netanyahu.
Still, Lapid has earned his cake this weekend. Ten years ago he founded a party out of nothing and he’s stuck at it ever since, building a stable and loyal base that has supplanted Labor in the political center. But despite being the man who finally took Netanyahu down, he hasn’t managed to expand his base beyond its heartland of the middle-class Tel Aviv suburbs.
He’s in no rush. He knows the only thing he can do to break that barrier is to prove himself a responsible prime minister, and he can’t start doing that before August 2023. Which is why he’s giving Bennett as much space as possible and to focus on his role as foreign minister. But in private, with his close coterie (most of whom have been with him throughout the past 10 years), he’s getting ready so he can be prepared on Day One for his biggest test yet.
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