The advisor, the politician and groei mee

What is your first reaction at reading groenlinks election program, groei mee? I tell you mine. It sounds nice. It really does. Isn't it refreshing in the politics of the last five years to read a vision text that is not over the threat of the foreigner, the poor or the rich? (CDA, VVD and SP, respectively). Or to read something different than empty breezy imaginery, like the PvdA from Bos? For me, it is. But why? Why I like this so much?

Well, you are reading this in english (even if it is a blog targeted at groenlinksers) because I am what you might call an international citizen (pompous but still true). I have born in argentina, lived in venezuela, studied in switzerland and finally settled in NL. I carry three passports and care about the politics of more than three countries. It is almost OBVIOUS that I am going to like our program. As the prominent Dadema wrote, this is a real cosmopolite program. Which makes me happy (It would make me happier if the comments from Gijs Termeer and Farah Karimi in our Magazine were inside the program, but this is issue for another column).

Now, how comes that GL goes cosmopolitan? How to explain the emphasize that groenlinks has decided to make in our international profile? Why this political choice? Groenlinks is green, is social, is multiculti... but the program is mainly international. A partial answer is Motivaction.

Motivaction is a research company, busy with mapping “the values that motivate people to act”. They have couple of nice tricks. If you ever visit their site, you will see graphs (http://www.motivaction.nl/105/Segmentatie/Mentality_tm/d:54/Mentality/d:140/Sociale-Milieus/) that are almost self explaining, which divides people in few fancy groups. And surely enough, cosmopolitans is one of those. Groenlinks, since already a while ago, has been using Motivaction research to map our electorate. And again not surprisingly, according to Motivaction guru Lampert, the people that votes groenlinks is dominated by cosmopolitans. Accordingly, advice has been giving already in the local elections from eight months ago, to target this part of the electorate.

So far all well and good. Here we have a party, that indeed has cosmopolitan members, that surely has cosmopolitan ideas, and that uses research that shows that has cosmopolitan electors. So this party has produced a -very nice, if I might repeat it- cosmopolitan election program.

But surely, there is catch. Take a look again at the result of the local elections. Did we win that one? Did we grow? The answer is not clear. The PvdA grew, that we know. We, mostly, remain stable. Still, too many factors are at play to draw a nice relation in between pro-cosmopolitan advice, local campaign, and votes obtained. There are many gemeenten in NL. But there is only one Tweede Kamer.

So in my view, these elections are going to be a dream experiment for the social scientist. Groenlinks so far has been coherent with the advice given. Is groenlinks going to win from the coming elections or not? If we loose, should we get rid of cosmopolitan campaigns? If we win, should we enhance them?

I am looking forward to the answer.