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Yair Lapid, the leader of the Israeli opposition, is certain he is ready to become prime minister. He has the qualities, he says. He has the experience.
But there’s something “way more important” at stake in the March 23 vote: The imperative to “say our farewells” to Benjamin Netanyahu.
Lapid argued, for three elections in succession, that the prime minister was a danger to Israeli democracy. Now, just ahead of the fourth, Netanyahu is in mid-trial, and Lapid believes that, if he is reelected, the Likud leader will move to cancel that trial — by pushing through legislation, effective retroactively, under which a serving prime minister cannot be prosecuted. He believes Netanyahu will drastically curb the power of the courts. He believes Netanyahu will turn Israel into an “illiberal democracy… Not a dictatorship,” but “an in-between, a hybrid, anywhere between Hungary and Turkey.”