The Darkenu movement announced on Sunday that it would begin a new campaign to persuade the public to strengthen moderates ahead of the April 9 election.
The announced goal of the campaign is to ensure that neither an exclusively right-wing or left-wing coalition will be formed that can be dominated by extremists.
“I don’t think it’s healthy for Israel to have a fully right-wing or fully left-wing government,” Darkenu executive director Polly Bronstein said. “There can be a government that the moderate majority feels comfortable with, where 80% of the people feel that they can compromise, because the other side is compromising as well.”
The campaign will be featured on buses, billboards and movie theaters and in what are expected to be hundreds of thousands of conversations between Darkenu’s volunteers and ordinary voters across the country.
“We believe Israel has a moderate majority that can agree on most things,” Bronstein said. “The fact that we are divided between camps enables cynical politicians to use divisive rhetoric to make us think we cannot work together. We believe the Center is the place where Left and Right can meet, so we are asking people to put Israel center-stage.”
Darkenu is the successor to V15 and before that, One Voice. After the 2015 election, in which V15 actively worked to defeat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Knesset passed the V15 Law, which limits the fund-raising and campaigning of political groups that are not parties.
While V15 avoided the law at the time by not supporting any particular political party, Darkenu can avoid limitations of the new law by neither being for nor against a party.
Bronstein promised that every step Darkenu would take would be accompanied by lawyers who will ensure the movement complies with the law. But critics of her movement said it was another in a long line of thinly disguised efforts to defeat Netanyahu and elect the Center-Left.
Likud MK Yoav Kisch, who sponsored the V15 law, vowed to closely monitor Darkenu.
“They will have to follow the law and if not, they will be prosecuted and taken to court,” Kisch said.