Campaigning season in the Netherlands is almost over; tomorrow, according to the polls between 40% and 67% of the potential voters will let its voice be known. What is going to be the outcome? I honestly have no clue and neither does anybody else since the polls are all over the place. My guess is that probably the Christian CDA and the social-democratic PvdA will become the two biggest parties, just like in our national Parliament. It seems as if most people still feel safer voting for moderate conservative ideas: Change, right?
When trying to predict the future, only one thing is sure: the right-wing, conservative, populist, nationalist (some list…) Freedom Party will become bigger than you’d want them to be.
Now of course I am biased since I am looking for it, but if people don’t show up tomorrow, it seems that the visibility of the MEPs has not been the problem this year: these last days there were so many candidate MEPs appearancing on the radio, television, newspapers and online that even I have not been able to keep up. In an interview in a major newspaper CDA candidate Wim van de Camp stated that he had been involved in so many debates with his social-democratic opponent Thijs Berman that by now he did not only knew his own lines by heart, but also those of the other camp.
I would say there is not a single park or square in the Netherlands that has not been visited by one campaign or another and has been flooded with leaflets (I was wondering whether the Greens have hired a team to clean up after them). Last weekend in Amsterdam I accidentally bumped into probably the last efforts D66 was making to increase its amount of seats (currently 1). Although the top of the list, those who actually have a realistic chance to become Parliamentarians where not available at the time (Number 1, Sophie in ‘t Veld had just left, 2, Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy was ’somewhere around’ and we already know everything about 3, Marietje Schaake), I have taken the opportunity to interview their Number Four: Gerhard Mulder (click HERE), the last in my series of Dutch MEP candidates.
For now that is.
Up next on my to-do list: VOTE!
(3 votes, average: 3.67 out of 5)
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