a conference on a saturday, 9 april

The sun is shinning and I am walking in what comes to me as early morning, to a conference room. It’s a perfect day to have a Groenlinks’ conference. We are the green party after all, no? Even in this country ridden by rain, sometimes there is good weather.

Our party has months organizing this conference. In about a year we are facing local elections, and then each city with an active Groenlinks party gets around organizing a list of candidates for city councilors, writes a program, do the campaign and eventually get into the city council, or even in the local government. Accordingly, the national party offers some sort of structural support. That is the conference in which I am walking into now.

This occasion is a perfect spot to explore that very interesting tension of any political -national- party. For example, “what do those guys in the capital know about our real situation here in the countryside?” Or… “Why those members of the smallest city, with 15 members in their local party demand so much?” This tension, in many cases, exists as a source of mutual frustration. Plenty of distrust exists in both fields towards the other. At best there is some sort of mutual disinterest, which today is being more or less broken. And when the disinterest is broken, very interesting things happen.

For example, I am sitting in a table with information from the Europa workgroup. Nothing is most remote to the local activist. But with the few people that gets closer, mutual surprise occurs. Close to the Europa werkgroep of Groenlinks we run the Heerlen group, which is a network of local greens across the national borders. From the very conception of the Green movement there is speak of an Europa of the regions, instead of an Europa of the nations. There is more in common with people living at either French or German sides of the Rhine, than in between that people and Paris or Berlin. So networks of local activists are interesting, because they share not only political goals, but also location realities. Then in the Saturday conference I could exchange lots of information about existing networks. People got surprised about a national workgroup running something actually interesting for them. And I got surprised about the number of many other existing networks.

Walking back to the train that would bring us back to Utrecht, we were laughing about a comment that our assistant in the Utrecht city council received. In a workshop on networking, he stood up to say something, presenting himself first “I am the assistant to the party in Utrecht, a city with 1200 party members”. The next intervention in the workshop started “I am so tired to hear about cities with thousands of members! My city is small and we have only 20 members!”. So some of the tension is not only city-country, after all.