It was one of the lowest points in Yair Lapid’s political career since he took over the Finance Ministry. In February, the chairman of Yesh Atid was ranked last in a poll of public satisfaction with each of the 23 ministers in the current government (including the most senior minister, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself). Before the last elections, Lapid emerged as the political hope of the “lost generation,” those many hundreds of thousands of Israelis who took to the streets in the summer of 2011 to demonstrate against the high cost of living and economic insecurity. Since then, Lapid has been forced to watch his supporters slip away from him.

In political terms, Lapid has been considered over the last few months a walking dead man. On the one hand, he still wields the enormous power that comes with 19 seats in the Knesset and the ability to topple the government. On the other, almost none of the public support that brought him there is left. Many of his voters felt desperate and deceived when they discovered that a year after he took office as the new finance minister, their ability to purchase an apartment was drifting further and further away, while the problem of the steep cost of living was only getting worse.

Lapid looked like he had lost his magic touch. He zigzagged and broke his promises to his voters, losing the support of many. Within a short time, the finance minister became the favorite punching bag of political pundits and the subject of scorn on social networks. His party, Yesh Atid, withered in the polls. In an effort to stop this trend, Lapid decided to adopt a diplomatic agenda in the spirit of the two-state solution, something he steered clear of at the start of his political career — but that did not help, either.

On March 18, Lapid revealed his plan to lower housing costs by eliminating the VAT tax on young couples’ first apartments. The chairman of Yesh Atid seems to think that the fight against the real estate bubble is the only thing that will bring voters back to him. Critics of the plan argued that it was populist, while Housing Minister Uri Ariel of the HaBayit HaYehudi party described it as “half baked.” Nevertheless, for the first time since he became finance minister, there are indications that Lapid is reconnecting with the lost generation.