Back to normal?

Well now, elections are over. Local elections that is. To me, one thing is clear. In Utrecht, Groenlinks is a stable party, it does have a stable electorate. We have keep the chairs in the city council that we have got six years ago. And that is, in principle, good. But good how?. Which ideas of groenlinks keep us alive? which electorate?

The past six years has seen in NL the equivalent of a frustrated revolution. The rising of the leefbaar parties, a sort of right wing populism, has deflated itself like a pinched balloon. In our city, the party leefbar utrecht change from 14 to 3 sits. If you compare that with the 14 seats of the bigger party (PvdA) and the eight seats of the second (we), you realize that the leefbaar revolt is over. That is good news, because it seems that the inhabitant of utrecht did not find herself in the style or contents of this upcoming right wing. Utrecht remains a resonably left wing city, and Groenlinks now hopes to take part in the government.

So we can congratulate ourselves that life, political life, is back to normal. And not only. It is hard for a party like Groenlinks to be opposition. Our strenght is the good city councellor, a persons that per definition is not a populist politician, but a long term serious worker. But after six years, looks like this low but serious profile gave good results. We will likely get into the government. And there will be chances to implement the program that has been developped in the last months.

One can ask, anyway, if this is the whole history. Actually... Does the disaparition of leefbaar means that people “has returned to their senses”. Is it true then than Utrecht comes back to be a mild left wing city? Shall we go on as before? Well, not really. Another interpretation is also possible.

In principle, we can agree that the leefbar party betrayed its own agenda. Many positions used as electoral flags six years ago, were reversed in office. And, perhaps even more important, the driving figure of Fortuin is long ago gone. So without coherence in the local politicias, and whitout a charismatic figure in the national sphere, the rising right wing populism was condemned to die. Nothing that was done by Groenlinks or other left wing parties has anything to do here. They just defeat themselves.

More important, the question is if the voters of leefbaar did vote yesterday. Have they found another party that might canalize their discontent? I don't think so. The mass of new voters six years ago, of angry people that went to the urns to complain, had nobody to vote for yesterday. But they remain discontent. The question that they posed to the political establishment six years ago is still unanswered.

A vote analyst might try to contradict this line of thinking. After all, more people voted yesterday than six years ago, not less. What is interesting is that many allochtoon voters did went to vote yesterday, much more than six years ago. And polls in this sector of the population claim that they were going to massively vote for what now has become the first party in utrecht, the socialdemocrats. We can say that as much as these people remained at home six years ago, this time they came and vote. And the ones that six years ago believe had an option in the leefbaar parties, remained at home.

In any case, these are good news for Groenlinks in general, and for Groenlinks Utrecht in particular. The group of people that is to become city councillors has a strong allochtoon component. The bestuur is about to launch a project to involve allochtoon people in the local politics. So here we can be the right people at the right moment. We just have to make true the imago that we gave.

The unanswered question is what to do with the discontent. Shall we ignore it, thinking that likely this group of people will not support Groenlinks politics no matter what? That is an option, surely so. But also we can think that being now back into the government (hopefully) it is high time for Groenlinks to explore new areas. We are, after all, an party of alternatives, convinced in the power of grass roots movements and local action (and global thinking). The challengue for Groenlinks in the four years to come is to root our agenda. To root it in the people from Utrecht.

wethouders

The last ALV from Groenlinks Utrecht occurred in the middle of the campaign. Accordingly, no discussions on ideology were expected. That we have left behind, after the program was goedgekeurd months ago. But discussion on strategy was welcome. The ALV gave her support and confidence to a commission that will take care of the forming of a new city government. If the votes are enough to make the government, of course. Interestingly enough, our candidates for being wethouders, the city equivalents of ministers, are not publicly disclosed. A strong argument plays here a role. A wethouder is supposed to be a person with experience enough in the management of a city. Most likely, then, he or she is currently working in public functions. But of course, the very same public function that gave experience enough to be wethouder, would be endangered if known will be that this person is a partisan candidate of groenlinks. So we have decided to keep our list private, to be disclosed only in negotiations with the other parties, once elections are done and it is known which parties have which amount of power.

Now, one might ask if this is not another version of the irritant back-room politics, which every single person is willing to denounce. Actually, my opinion there is kind of split. On one side, I would like to have candidates that have no problem with going public. If a potential wethouder of Groenlinks feels damaged by going public as Groenlinks candidate, then that is a candidate that does not strike me as seriously committed with groenlinks ideas. But on the other side, reality is beyond my wishes. And actually I can imagine that the director of one of the non-partisan institutions that actually runs the city, will be impaired in his, or her, work, if becomes known his, or her, willingness to take on a position that requires the support of a party, and is ideologically tinted. So, when in doubt about the political system of The Netherlands, I shut up. I remain an allochtoon, and better to learn before arguing for some hopeless political standpoint.

Now, perhaps more interesting than the arguments that Groenlinks Utrecht have for keeping our candidates out of the public spotlight, is what are we going to do with the arguments in themselves. Robert Gisbert brought up the point to discussion. We do know that in some of the coming debates, the debater from Groenlinks will be asked about candidates names. What should this person answer, then? Well, strange as it sounds to me, we agree that the answer might be, eventually and after being repeated several times, to release one or two names, such as the name of Robert himself (who has no problem to go public). But my problem, again perhaps due to my still incipient understanding of the subtleties of Dutch politics, is that we are not intending to release to the public our actual real arguments not to mention the candidates. So, our position seems to be as follow: we have arguments to follow strategy A, but those are arguments that do not come very nice across the public. So we are not going to defend our own arguments to do A. Instead, we will do A as long as we can, and if forced to, we would do a (A, but not capital).

What I wonder about is that, if we groenlinksers, and utrechtsers as we are, are convinced by our own arguments... why don't we put them to the public? Are we scared of an unfriendly reception? Well, it seems to me that this is what debates are about, to open up to a potential voter, how do we think. But again, I might be wrong. We will actually see, when elections are done and over.