The Foreign Ministry claim attached to his 2021 tenure, not to anything he has said this cycle. Under the merger deal Bennett is the sole candidate for prime minister, and N12's reading of the agreement is that nothing has been settled about who serves as minister.
Who they are
Yair Lapid founded Yesh Atid and has led the opposition for most of the past six years, after a career as a newspaper columnist and television anchor. He was born in Tel Aviv in 1963 to Yosef (Tommy) Lapid, a journalist and politician who survived the Holocaust as a child in Yugoslavia, and the novelist and playwright Shulamit Lapid. He left the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium without a matriculation certificate and spent most of his army service reporting for the military weekly Bamahane.
He reported for Ma’ariv, edited the city paper Iton Tel Aviv and wrote a weekly column for nineteen years, alongside books, screenplays, songs and film roles. From 2000 he presented interview programmes on Channel 2, and from 2008 he anchored its Friday news edition until he left the newsroom for politics at the start of 2012.
He registered Yesh Atid that spring and it took nineteen seats at its first election. He was finance minister under Benjamin Netanyahu until he was dismissed alongside the justice minister, Tzipi Livni. His party later merged into the Blue and White list with Benny Gantz and Moshe Ya’alon, which split apart after the 2020 election. Lapid assembled the coalition that took office in 2021, serving as foreign minister and alternate prime minister before taking the top job for the last six months of 2022.
Positions and record
Diplomacy: Rebuild ties with Washington and Europe.
Burden sharing: Universal draft; no stipends without service.
Judiciary: Reverse the overhaul, then a consensual constitution.
Haredi draft and voting rights: He has proposed barring ultra-Orthodox men who don't enlist from voting: 'Whoever does not enlist will not vote in the elections' -- a step beyond the party's draft-law line into voting-rights territory.
Where they stand
Breaks with the party line on 2 issues, marked below.