Lapid: If We Beat Likud by 4, ‘No Power on Earth’ Can Stop Us Forming Coalition

By Staff, Agencies

If Blue and White beats Likud by four or more seats in Tuesday’s elections, “no power on earth” will stop it forming the next coalition, the centrist party’s No.2 Yair Lapid said Thursday.

Lapid was speaking shortly before Channel 12’s final pre-election poll gave Blue and White, headed by ex-“Israeli” Occupation Force [IOF] chief Benny Gantz, a 30-26 seat advantage over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, although a Kan Channel 11 poll forecast a 31-30 advantage to Likud.

Both polls indicated that a Netanyahu-led right-wing and religious bloc could build a 64-seat coalition, but Lapid was adamant that some parties that have made plain their preference for Likud over Blue and White could change their stance if his party tops Netanyahu’s by four or more seats.

“If we will win with a gap of four, five, six seats [over Likud], we will form the government. There’s no power on earth that will prevent us from doing so,” added Lapid.

Asked what role he expected “Israeli” President Reuven Rivlin to play in this — Rivlin will decide who to ask to form the government, based on recommendations from members of all parties that win Knesset seats — Lapid said, “I am expecting the president, as will the people of ‘Israel’, to listen to what the people have to say: If the people of ‘Israel’ are going to tell me we voted for Blue and White, and Blue and White won…”

Lapid also suggested that parties that have explicitly backed Netanyahu throughout the election campaign may change their tune were Blue and White to win decisively, and could opt to recommend Gantz for the premiership and seek to join a Gantz-led coalition.

“People say stuff in election times. And then, when governments are formed, people say different things… My advice is always to go back to basics: Winners get to form governments. Losers don’t,” he said.

Even the ultra-Orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism parties, which have ruled out a coalition with Blue and White, could realign themselves, Lapid claimed, if they were “facing the possibility of three or four years in opposition.”

The last time the Haredi parties were in the opposition was when Lapid’s Yesh Atid party joined a Netanyahu-led government in 2013. It’s unclear how the parties would work together now, with Lapid — who would replace Gantz as prime minister two and a half years after the election under a rotation deal signed between the two — seeking to advance a laundry list of policies vehemently opposed by the ultra-Orthodox.

The Yesh Atid leader, who merged his party with Gantz’s “Israel” Resilience and Moshe Ya’alon’s Telem in an effort to oust Netanyahu, also predicted that Likud could quickly dump its leader if Blue and White defeats Likud decisively.

“They’re gonna say their farewells faster than anyone thinks,” he said. “There’s a huge underground bitterness within Likud. One of Bibi’s biggest flaws is that he doesn’t allow anyone to flourish next to him. He’s making sure people are held down to the ground. Nobody likes it. As long as he’s in power they’re going to be cautious about it. But you can hear the first voices [of dissent] coming out of Likud. And they talk to me. The minute he will lose some ground, there will be a reaction.”

But Lapid said that trying to predict exactly how the next Knesset might look was impossible given the four to five parties that may or may not pass the electoral threshold, in his estimation, with each able to swing the blocs by four seats in either direction.

He said polling done for the media, which often has a higher margin of error than the Knesset threshold of 3.25%, needed to be taken with a jaundiced eye, and asserted that pollsters were also overstating the strength of smaller parties.

“If they don’t, they get phone calls from (Kulanu leader Moshe) Kahlon, (Yisrael Beitenu head) Avigdor Liberman and other players, saying ‘if you twice publish a poll telling people I’m not passing the threshold, I will disappear because of you.’ So they’re rounding up, and they’re being cautious, and maybe they should be.”

Thursday’s polls, released after Lapid’s comments, predicted all of the current parties in the coalition passing the threshold and therefore boosting the right-wing bloc to 64 seats, enough to give Netanyahu the majority in the 120-seat Knesset.