Voting time again!

Voting time again!, originally uploaded by CharlesFred.

This time for our City Council and for our Local Council. As a resident of Amsterdam, I am allowed to vote in these elections, not for the National Parliament, as you have to be a Dutchie to vote in them. Those elections come around more often than once in three years as Holland has become a banana republic led by a buffoon who doesn't know how to lead a country or hold together a cabinet.

I woke up thinking I would vote for 'my' party, D66 (on the bottom right - Anders Ja D66), but when I completed the Stemwijzer (Vote Picker) , it turned out that of all the 12 or so parties running in Amsterdam, I was less aligned with D66 than any other of the parties. Strange, as D66 positions itself as a social liberal party like myself.

However, how liberal is a party which wants to put more police on streets, or which does not want to retain the right for people to squat buildings which have been empty for more than a year, reduce parking tarriffs and so on? At least they didn't want CCTV cameras to be placed at rubbish bins to catch the people who don't dispose of their rubbish properly (this is supported by the Labour Party and the Right Wing Liberal Party).

I could not find a mainstream party which wants to stop work on the doomed-to-fail and totally unnecessary North-South Metro Line, which requires a massive tunnel to eb bored under the main streets of Amsterdam, which is built on sand and marshland and where houses have already started sinking during the preliminary phases of the build. This line takes commuetrs from Central Station to the banking district of Amsterdam-Zuid, despite the fact that there are numerous trams and existing metro lines which can take them there, not to mention a network of bicycle lanes. It is a prestige project for the vain local politicians who lied to us about the costs when they started and are probably still lying about the estimated costs. However, because all the main parties are implicated in this fiasco, they can hardly turn around to oppose it now and I am not going to give my vote away to some lunatic fringe one-issue party which makes a mockery of democracy.

So, I ended up voting for the party which came out top-of-the-list (for the first time with me) , the party which Fred has almost always voted for, namely GroenLinks (Green Left), which has a faulously glamourous and intelligent leader in Femke Halsema. I had to choose a candidate as well as well as a party and looked down the list for anice Turkish name and voted for that person - number 16 both times!

Let's see how they get on later this evening.

I would like to say that I am more than happy how our local council has been doing their work the last few years and our neighbourhood has undergone many improvements.

Not so happy about the City Council or the City Centre Council (which I would like to see abolished immediately), but Amsterdam is still a good place to live, so can't complain too much...