Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid on Saturday refused to say who he would recommend to form the next government coalition following the January 22 election.
Lapid spoke in a Channel 2 interview minutes after Tzipi Livni attacked him in the same studio for not obligating himself to recommend that someone in the Center-Left bloc form the government and not Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
"I will tell you who I will recommend after the elections," Lapid stated. "I don'y know what the results will be, or how the negotiations will be hadled...it would be irresponsible of me to say who I was recommending beforehand. I will say that I won't sit in a right-wing extremist haredi coaliton."
As to whether or not he would sit in a government with Bayit Yehudi leader Nafatali Bennett, Lapid said, "I agree with Bennett on a lot of things, but not with his party." Lapid said that there were "many troubling extremists" on the Bayit Yehudi list "who do what their rabbis tell them to...It bothers me that Bennett says Torah students don't need to enlist in the army."
He added, however, "I'm not ruling anyone out."