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.