A very good set of results in the council elections

Three days into Spring!, originally uploaded by CharlesFred.

Time for a quick run through of the results of Wednesday's elections.

First of all, the party for which I voted, GroenLinks, won two seats, going up from 5 to 7 in our local council, whilst city-wide, they stayed the same at 7 seats, so not bad.

In the meantime, my favourite party D66, went up from 1 to 5 seats locally and from 2 to 7 in the city council, whilst nationally they were the BIG winners on the night going up from 133 to over 500.

Other good news was that CDA LOST many seats, PbdA lost also, but not as many as they ahd expected to lose, which was also good.

AND, our dear friend Ahmed Marcouch, who was potentially on his way out of politics having lost his place in West Amstetdam, received seven times as many preferred votes than he needed to be voted into the City Council for the PvdA.

Ahmed Marcouch comes from Morocco and has done a great job in Amsterdam West trying to connect communities together, notably Muslims and gay people, whilst also taking a hard-line against badly behaved youths and extremist imams who do not accept Dutch society. He is exactly the sort of chap the country needs more of, sensible, level headed, open-minded, strict, with humour. Well done that man!