In February, Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid was a guest at the Globes Conference, where he explained why the left would not win an Israeli election in the next 20 years. Lapid argued, “You see it demographically, by age and by opinion. Every year, people who believe in leftist ideas die, and people with right-wing and centrist ideas are born. People see that they are stabbed with knives and see the madness of the world around us, and the numbers say that the left will not win an election here. The center will. That’s where we’re headed. No one could sell me as a leftist; my father was a [Menachem] Begin man.”

This statement, backed by moves, actions and declarations, explain Lapid’s rise, which reached its latest zenith in a Sept. 6 poll that indicates his party would have won the most Knesset seats had elections taken place that day. 

After the 2015 elections, Lapid understood very well that the path to the prime minister’s office passes through the right by way of making the left into an outcast. He accused the left of silence in the face of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' lies (so he claimed) and brushed off any affiliation with the left-wing bloc, although his electoral base is found deep within the center-left, and his rise in the polls is mostly at the expense of the center-left Zionist Camp.

However one looks at it, it’s a paradox: Lapid insults the left, and shakes it off in every way, while most of his voters are the beating heart of the moderate ideological left, the same left that bounced between Kadima, Labor, Hatnua and the Zionist Camp in the past decade. Lapid has succeeded in making Yesh Atid the largest party by turning a cold shoulder to the left and attempting to flatter the ultra-Orthodox. His success in the September poll is the result of hard work, the strategy behind which is the branding of himself as “lite right.” The big story from the poll is not only the 24 seats it says Lapid could win, but also the crash of Israel's political left, perhaps marking the lowest point in its history.