Kahlon and Levy-Abekasis file slates for upcoming elections

Representatives from Moshe Kahlon’s Kulanu and Orly Levy-Abekasis’s Gesher parties and have filed their slates at the Central Elections Committee.

Both parties, who have platforms on socio-economic issues, will run independently in the upcoming race.

Levy-Abekasis says her Gesher party will be “the surprise of these elections,” and will outdo its currently poor polling.

Levy-Abekasis said yesterday that the party would run alone after failing to reach a merger agreement with former military chief Benny Gantz’s Israel Resilience.

“We are not in anyone’s pockets. Gesher will follow its own path,” she tells journalists after filing the list with the committee. “I was courted by different parties for many months, especially Israel Resilience. I gave it a chance, I wanted to try.”

Levy-Abekasis says negotiations fell apart despite her having reached written agreements with Gantz that included Israel Resilience’s adoption of Gesher’s socio-economic platform as one of the alliance’s main campaign planks, as well as which spots on a unified list her party members would receive.

She, nonetheless, says that Gesher will still enter the Knesset “because there is a need for a party that knows about and cares about the challenges facing people. ​We will be here for the people who need it.”

The Gesher slate includes Yifat Bitton, a law professor and social activist; Hagai Reznik, the former director-general of the Housing Ministry; David “Dadi” Perlmutter, a former vice president of Intel; Liat Yakir, a geneticist; Dan Shaham, a former diplomat and foreign ministry official; Hagai Lavi, an educator; Michal Hirsch Negri, the former director-general of the Ra’anana municipality; Gilad Samama, the director-general of the Social Equality Ministry; and Carmel Elmakayes, a social activist.

— Raoul Wootliff