‘Can you help me load these bags of potting soil into the car?’, a 78-year-old woman asks Corné de Rooij on Saturday afternoon in the parking lot of the De Boerenschuur shopping center in the Brabant village of Riel. “Aha, this is servitude in practice,” laughs the leader of the new local party Common Sense Goirle Riel, while he lifts the bags in the trunk of the gray Peugeot 108.
Service is one of the spearheads of his newly founded party. But common sense or not, he can forget the voice of the elderly woman. ‘I’m not going to vote at all, I’ll leave that to others this time,’ she says jokingly. ‘All my life I’ve always voted, especially for Wilders in recent years, as a protest vote.’
Until three years ago, arable farmer De Rooij (54) was still party chairman of the CDA in the small municipality of Goirle, near Tilburg. With 24 thousand inhabitants , it consists of the villages of Goirle and Riel . But due to a change in the conference system, he suddenly found it too busy. He gave up his seat and left politics. In the background it also played a role that he had more and more difficulty with the views of his old party due to the provincial agricultural policy and the national Omtzigt affair.
Gap politics and citizen
‘I sat on the sidelines for three years, then you get a somewhat different view of politics than when you’re in that carousel yourself,’ he explains his return. ‘Then you see how big the gap is between politicians and citizens. A survey last year showed great dissatisfaction with the policy – half of the residents even wanted to abolish Goirle as an independent municipality and join Tilburg. That result triggered me. The policy can and must be improved.’
The establishment of Gezond Verstand Goirle Riel last autumn is part of the steady advance of local parties in the Netherlands, of which there are now about a thousand. Nearly 40 percent of the electoral lists for these municipal elections are local parties. In the previous council elections, almost 30 percent of the vote went to the ‘localos’. That is considerably more than the score of the largest national party in 2018: the VVD with 13.5 percent.
The new local party in Goirle aims for a subservient municipality and a ‘new politics’. Residents should be more involved in policy: making more use of ‘their knowledge and skills’ instead of hiring expensive consultancy firms. The municipal council comes to the citizen and more often meets outside the council chamber ‘on location’, such as in the canteen of the football club or the recreation room of the nursing home.
‘The bureaucratic fortress must be broken open’, says De Rooij. More transparency, more good conversations and mediation instead of constantly litigating in the event of disagreements or objections.
While the SP (two seats) is not participating in these elections due to a lack of candidates, Common Sense found thirty people from both villages willing to be on the electoral list ‘in no time’. Among them are many young people, including 19-year-old environmental science student Teun van den Brand, who ranks 3rd on the list. ‘I took part in a lot of debates in high school and I’m interested in politics,’ he says. “I believe that many problems, whether large or small, can be solved by listening carefully to people.”
Jelle van Loon, also 19 years old and fourth on the list, is handing out party brochures and yellow-pink bacon (in the colors of the lot) to the shopping public in the parking lot in front of the shopping center. ‘We think we can do a lot, especially for young people,’ says the technical business administration student and hockey player at Heren 1 of MHC Goirle. He found the new local party through a good friend. ‘I always associated the city council with old-fashioned politics,’ says the teenager. ‘But with Common Sense we are going to look at local politics with an innovative, fresh look.’
Major concerns
The party counts on a large following, including the thirty candidates on the electoral list, and therefore on three or four seats. Goirle already has two local parties that are also (together with CDA and VVD) in the Executive Council: Lijst Riel Goirle and Pro Actief Goirle. “But they just didn’t do it right,” says Nancy Janssen (47), mediator by profession and number 2 on the list. ‘Financially we are very shaky. There are major concerns about housing, culture and sports. I’ve lived in Goirle all my life, and I wonder if my children can still live in this beautiful village.’
Later in the afternoon, Common Sense’s top candidates travel through the village in a Land Cruiser and trailer with yellow-pink streamers and sound system. A resident who is checking his electric charging station is offered a folder and a batch of bacon. He doesn’t know yet what he will vote for, but he thinks it is positive and refreshing that a new local party is competing for the voter’s favor.
“These are local elections, so the more local parties the better,” the man says. ‘That is better than the national parties, which have less ties with the local community.’
However, on the sports field of the Riel football club, where the short election caravan of Gezond Verstand also lands, Jack Kouwenberg (75) thinks otherwise. More than forty years ago, he was the founder of the local Lijst Riel, which later merged into Lijst Riel Goirle. ‘You could also have joined us, we are among people day and night,’ he says to De Rooij with a piercing finger. ‘Not yet another local party’, Kouwenberg sighs. ‘That only leads to even more fragmentation, making it increasingly difficult to form a coalition.’
The leader of Common Sense taps Kouwenberg on the shoulder amicably: ‘The other parties are not happy with our arrival. They see us as a threat.’