Campagne commissie

Back from holidays, I found myself sited in the house of Jasper Fastl, talking with other four groennlinksers on the future of our campaign for the city council. It seems to be early still in our agenda, so the discussion is not yet ordered. But some patterns begin to appear in the middle of our brainstorm. Perhaps we owe to the weather of this rainy country more than what we would like to accept, and our discussion is just like another day of diffuse rain, in which only slowly one can recompose the blue sky beyond, out from the little pieces of blue that shine now and then in between the clouds. So what will the campaign of groenlinks looks like?

At least for me, one thing is clear. This campaign is going to be uphill. Groenlinks is hardly a traditional opposition party, less of all in Utrecht. Our short life of almost twenty years in politics has seen us frequently in the government of the city, but not for the last time. And our groenlinksers are people qualified to do things, to bring a needed moderation in the hawkish proposals of others. But as an opposition party, in the last six years, it has been hard to get the nuance to the elector. Doomsayers and shouters have hijacked the political debate, as leefbaar utrecht on one side, and sympthetical pragmatists, as the PvdA, a party that has no qualms to reverse their more progressive positions in order to gain a bit of power. So the challenge of groenlinks today is to reinvent herself, or at least to show herself as it really is. In groenlinks the traditions of left wing an ecologism gets together. Groenlinks has provoked fundamental changes in our city, making it more friendly and less gray. So the challenge that our campagne commisie has is to find again the style that get this message across. This time we are not saddled by controversial proposals, neither we have a lot to show from our work in the city council. Will we be able to show ourselves again as the alternative that we really are, in our times of neo-conservatism, insecurity and fear? Has our message, one of greening and solidarity, any relevance in times of bombs and unemployment, of failed integration and international terrorism? I do think so. We will have still to see how do we manage… in the campagne commisie.