Lapid says he would serve as finance minister again

Yesh Atid chairman Yair Lapid said Saturday that he would go back to the Finance Ministry after the March 2015 elections if given the opportunity.

Lapid was sacked as finance minister earlier this month by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — along with Hatnua leader Tzipi Livni, who served as justice minister — as a precursor to the dissolution of the Likud-led coalition amid heated squabbling over legislation, disputes over the state budget and swiftly denied accusations by Netanyahu that ministers Lapid and Livni had tried to oust him in a “putsch.”

Speaking at a cultural event in Ness Tziona, Lapid accused Netanyahu of “ruining the economy” and then trying to pin the failures on him.

“Netanyahu and his people decided that their personal interests are what’s most important, not what’s good for the Israeli public. This group ruined the Israeli economy and then looked for someone to blame to divert attention from what they have done,” Lapid charged.

The former finance minister said he spent a year rehabilitating the economy and then came up with a state budget that would “help the middle class and the lower class, and they ruined that too.”

Nonetheless, Lapid said the Finance Ministry was a place where one could effect real change and he and his party would be happy to take that post again.

Lapid charged that Netanyahu called for elections because he was “afraid of passing the most socially minded budget in recent years and a housing plan that we proposed, and give us the credit.”

The Yesh Atid head welcomed the merger between Livni and Labor’s Isaac Herzog to form a center-left bloc, predicting that other similar unions between parties may occur before elections.

“Tzipi and I spoke. She chose to go with the leftist bloc and that’s her prerogative. It’s not a bad thing, it’s a good thing,” he said.

Lapid has been positioning himself in the center of the Israeli political map, and injected his speech with talk of the Likud on the “extreme right” and Labor, Hatnua and Meretz on the left.

Yesh Atid, which won 19 seats in 2013, is set to drop to 12 seats after the March 17 vote, according to polls.

Recent reports indicate that Lapid has been looking to align himself with other seemingly centrist parties, like Moshe Kahlon’s Kulanu party, and even Avigdor Liberman’s more hawkish Yisrael Beytenu.

“Everyone is talking to everyone, ” Lapid said Saturday

According to a recent poll conducted by Yesh Atid, a union with Kahlon would yield between 24 and 28 mandates, Channel 10 reported Friday. The recently announced merger between Herzog’s Labor party and Hatnua leader Livni, the center-left bloc, would also result in 24 seats, compared with Netanyahu’s rightist Likud at 23, according to a Channel 2 poll this week.

Lapid is said to be trying to press Kahlon into agreeing to a merger between their two parties, given the seemingly strong showing in recent surveys, and is reported to have held talks with Liberman in recent weeks.

Liberman and Kahlon both denied the reports.