Yesh Atid chairman Yair Lapid and former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni are in talks about possibly running together in the upcoming March 23 election, Haaretz reported on Monday.
According to the report Livni, who heads the Hatnua party, is weighing a return to politics following the disintegration of Benny Gantz's Blue and White party.
At the same time, Lapid may be looking to separate from Moshe Ya’alon and his Telem faction.
Livni announced that she was stepping down from politics before the elections for the 21st Knesset which took place in April of 2019, after then-Labor chief Avi Gabbay abruptly ended his party’s alliance with Livni’s Hatnua faction.
Five months later, however, there were reports that Livni was considering a return to politics, though she denied those reports.
Last December there was speculation that Livni would be trying to join the Blue and White party. She denied those reports.
Haaretz noted that Livni would bring an important asset to a partnership with Yesh Atid: The money in Hatnua’s coffers. In the 2015 election, Hatnua joined with Labor to run as Zionist Union and five members of the party were elected to the Knesset, which gave it 7 million shekels ($2.2 million) in party funding from the government annually.
According to the party’s financial statement for 2017, it had 2.8 million shekels in the bank at the time. While some of the money was presumably spent on preparing to run in the April 2019 elections, the party still has an estimated 2 million shekels available.
Both Livni and Yesh Atid refused to comment on the report.