Yair Lapid narrowly bests challenger Ram Ben Barak in first Yesh Atid leadership race

By Sam Sokol 28 March 2024, 8:13 pm

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Sam Sokol is a former political correspondent at The Times of Israel. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"

Left: Yesh Atid head MK Yair Lapid speaking during a faction meeting at the Knesset in Jerusalem, July 17, 2023. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90); right: MK Ram Ben Barak leading a joint meeting of the Foreign Affairs and Internal security Committees, at the Knesset in Jerusalem, June 20, 2022. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Yesh Atid chairman Yair Lapid beats challenger Ram Ben Barak by a hair’s breadth in the centrist party’s first competitive primary.

Lapid wins only 52.5 percent of the vote, after 720 members of the party conference cast their votes in Tel Aviv on Thursday. Ben Barak received 47.5% of the votes. The difference is 36 votes.

Speaking after the results are tallied, Lapid thanks Ben Barak “for a fair race.”

“The primaries are over, but our war has only just begun,” he says. “Because there is no one but us who offers this country a different vision and a different direction. Everyone surrendered and went and settled under Netanyahu and only we remained, so only we will make the change.”

“Until a few weeks ago, every person I met has told me one of two things: either he told me, ‘Why don’t you enter the government,’ or he told me, ‘Why aren’t you a more aggressive opposition?'”

‘I am no longer told either of the two things. Every person we meet today tells us something different. They say: ‘Save us!’ They say this because they remember that we already saved them once. Even then no one believed it was possible, but we did it and they want us to do it again,” he says.

“This government is responsible for the greatest disaster that has happened to the Jewish people since the Holocaust, and it has one goal, and one goal only: to forget it. Let’s forget it happened on their watch. There is no country in the world, not even one, where these people would stay in office even one more day.”

“We need a government that will recruit ultra-Orthodox without fear, that will write a constitution, that will invest our money in state education and small businesses and technology, that will build our ties with the United States and the moderate Arab countries instead of destroying them, that instead of insulting people will bring people together,” Lapid adds.

“2024 is an election year. There will be elections. The change this country needs starts here and starts now. It’s time to write a new chapter in the life of this party, and in the life of this country.”