‘A win is a win’: Lapid urges patience as uncertain effort to form government unfolds away from public eye

Outgoing opposition leader and B’Yachad No. 2 Yair Lapid declares that the anti-Netanyahu bloc “won” the election on Tuesday, despite not achieving an outright victory, and asks the public for patience as it begins working to try and cobble together a government with no clear path to majority rule.

The anti-Netanyahu bloc received a combined 67 seats out of a possible 120, which would be a comfortable majority if three of the four Jewish-led parties, Yashar, B’Yachad and Yisrael Beytenu, hadn’t ruled out sitting in coalition with the predominantly Arab Joint List and Ra’am.

Netanyahu’s bloc received 53 seats, and his Likud party is the largest one, with 27 seats, but he too has no clear path to a 61-seat majority

Lapid, in a post on X, acknowledges that Netanyahu’s opponents “wanted a clear, immediate victory, the kind you can go to sleep with. But that isn’t what we got.”

But he says the opposition bloc still won in several ways.

“Netanyahu received 53 seats. A collapse. And even within that low number, 13 of those seats belong to parties that consider themselves anti-Zionist,” he writes, referring to the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism and Shas, which won seven and six seats, respectively.

“He is left with 40 [seats],” Lapid assesses. “That’s what he has. No matter what he does, he doesn’t have any way to form a government.”

“So we won,” he declares. “It wasn’t a knockout; it was a win on points. But points count too. A win is a win.”

The outgoing opposition leader says his bloc, led by Yashar chair Gadi Eisenkot, will do everything in its power to try and form a government, but says it will be “difficult,” and success is not guaranteed.

“So I need to ask you for something difficult to ask of Israelis: patience.”

Forming a government, he says, is the “exact opposite” of the election campaign process: “It takes place in small rooms, slowly, away from the cameras.”

“I know that human beings detest uncertainty, but consider how much you would hate to find out in a month from now that for the sake of a headline or a leak, we had failed to work smartly, quietly, or precisely.”

So, he says, “If you want to know whether anything is happening behind the silence you’re currently hearing, the answer is yes.”