Lapid and Gantz go from united duo to trouble in paradise

Once upon a time, in February 2019, Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz were captured in an iconic bromantic photo. Ahead of the first round of elections, just a short while after they reached an agreement forming the joint “Blue and White” venture, Lapid and Gantz embraced in an intimate and warm hug, which was strategically photographed and tweeted to market the newlywed alliance to the masses.

The Gantz-Lapid duo presented the center-left camp with the most powerful and viable competition against Benjamin Netanyahu in years, but the fairy-tale honeymoon was short-lived: A year and three election campaigns later, their relationship fell apart, when Gantz decided to split from Lapid and explored Netanyahu as an alternative companion. Over three years have passed since the Lapid-Gantz breakup, but their dynamics still resemble those of a divorced couple, forced to live with each other and share a roof for the sake of the kids, while constantly competing over their love and affection.

The latest chapter in the Lapid-Gantz strained rivalry is being written these days, against the backdrop of the Netanyahu government’s judicial overhaul and the mighty anti-reform movement awakening and energizing their joint electoral base. Gantz, according to all polls, has been the main benefactor of the coalition’s rocky debut, with his party spiking to 27-29 mandates, over 200% from the 12 seats it has in the current Knesset. He added between six and eight mandates of disappointed Likud voters, as well as five to six seats that abandoned Lapid’s Yesh Atid since the November elections. Gantz also constantly defeats Netanyahu in personal suitability questions, while Lapid, who bears the prestigious title of the former prime minister, lags behind them both in his premiership suitability ratings.

Gantz is a star on a roll

In the world of media images and pollsters, Gantz is a star on a roll, but in the real world, in which no elections are in sight, Lapid is still the leader of the opposition and of the largest party in the anti-Netanyahu bloc, bonding him and his ex-buddy to cooperate and fight together against the judicial overhaul and other menaces of Netanyahu’s extremist and fundamentalist coalition. Only that Gantz isn’t ready to acknowledge Lapid’s leadership status. Ever since the first week of the anti-reform protests, from which Lapid decided to stay away and which Gantz wisely embraced, Gantz regularly challenges Lapid with independent responses, tactics and maneuvers, messaging he is a master to himself.

Yesh Atid and the National Unity parties have been negotiating together on a joint team at President Isaac Herzog’s constitutional workshop for the past two months. However, ahead of the March 27 freeze on the judicial legislation blitz which launched the official presidential mediation, Gantz sent his confidants to secret talks with Herzog’s team and Netanyahu’s loyalists, without updating Lapid on the progress of the unofficial channel. And even though the two parties represent exactly the same electorate and have an almost identical ideological position on the democratic matters on the negotiation table, Gantz constantly distances himself from Lapid’s redlines, presenting his own criteria and demands for talks and compromise.

The latest feud between the divorced couple surfaced this week, over the identity of the opposition’s candidate for the Judicial Selection Committee, slated to be elected by the Knesset on June 14. As part of the presidential mediation, the coalition agreed to hold the ballot for the committee, maintaining its current composition, without any of the proposed Levin-Rothman judiciary changes. According to a nonbinding parliamentary tradition, the Knesset selects one coalition MK and one opposition MK to the prestigious panel, but that tradition has been broken more than once, with political tricks and deals altering the results of the secret ballot in recent years. This time, in the wake of the judicial overhaul and the forceful liberal dissent, the opposition cannot afford to lose its place on the committee, and Lapid and Gantz have both threatened to end presidential talks if the coalition uses its 64-seat majority to elect two of its MKs. In the meantime, they fell into another round of infighting over who will be the candidate, displaying their frictions once again.

Lapid unilaterally announced Yesh Atid’s Karin Elharar as his nominee three weeks ago, without consulting or convening the other party leaders in the opposition in advance, especially enraging Gantz and some of his fellow party members, who are eying the seat for themselves. On Monday, as Gantz was contemplating whom to nominate as his own candidate for the post, Lapid tweeted a public call to his allies in the opposition to unite behind Elharar and avoid the “unthinkable gift to Levin and Rothman” by splitting up the vote. Anonymous sources from the National Unity Party then slammed back at him, accusing him of a “magnificent own goal” by rushing forward and establishing facts on the ground without coordination. Meanwhile, with Lapid and Gantz at loggerheads, Labor MK Efrat Rayten also announced her own bid for the seat, further complicating Lapid’s attempts to take ownership of the position.

By Wednesday, everyone agreed to try to calm down. Lapid and Gantz met in the Knesset to discuss the contentious nomination, and affirmed “the need to work together and coordinate” on the Judicial Selection Committee, according to a joint statement they issued at the end. Gantz published a similar description of a meeting he had with Merav Michaeli earlier that day, emphasizing himself, and not Lapid, as the grown-up leading the internal compromise efforts. The opposition leaders have until Wednesday to agree on one candidate. However they could be fighting for nothing, as the seat might turn out to be an empty job. Justice Minister Yariv Levin, the disappointed architect of the frozen plan to revolutionize and politicize the judicial selection process, has been telling whoever asks that he has no motivation or intention to convene the committee in its current composition.

According to well-informed coalition sources, Levin conditions any substantial progress on the judges’ selection with a demand to advance at least parts of his original legislation package, with or without achieving a presidential consensus with the opposition. Lapid and Gantz both refuse to agree to any understandings before securing the opposition’s seat on the panel, leaving the judicial reform and the negotiations at the President’s Residence in the limbo until after the Knesset vote on June 14. The two center-left leaders have semantic differences in their demands and terms for the continuation of the negotiations.

The one who gains the most from the former couple’s bickering and infighting is Netanyahu, of course, who is well known for his ability to split, divide and conquer his rivals. Given Gantz’s rising popularity, Lapid cannot allow himself to walk out of the talks and leave his partner as the leading protagonist; and vice versa, Gantz has no interest in rerunning his 2020 failed affair with Netanyahu, which consequently led to Gantz’s political collapse in the following elections, and to Lapid’s rise to leadership in the center-left camp. The Lapid-Gantz broken marriage keeps them in a trial separation, in which they can’t live with each other, but cannot live without each other, as well.