If PvdA and GroenLinks join the council after the provincial elections in Brabant, they will only do so together. The leaders of the two parties announced this on Friday.
In the executive board of the province, Provincial Executive (GS), they want to jointly ‘form a solid and socially green bloc’, that is the ambition. By joining forces, the two parties also hope to emerge from the elections as the largest bloc.
‘Becoming the biggest together is realistic’
“Together we now have eight seats in the Provincial Council. We count on profit, so becoming the largest together is realistic and hopeful,” says Jade van der Linden, party leader of GroenLinks.
The VVD is currently the largest in Brabant with ten seats, followed by the CDA with nine seats. These two parties, D66 and (still as two ‘separate’ parties) GroenLinks and PvdA now together form GS. The latter two parties call the closer cooperation after the elections on 15 March a logical next step. “In more than half of the Brabant municipalities, GroenLinks and PvdA already form a joint group in the city council,” reports PvdA party leader Ward Deckers. “And also at a national level, the Senate factions will be merged after the elections.”
‘Bringing fusion closer’
PvdA and GroenLinks seem to be growing ever closer together. Earlier this week, a number of prominent politicians from the PvdA and GroenLinks had become members of both parties, including Job Cohen and Diederik Samsom from the PvdA and Bram van Ojik from GroenLinks. This with the aim of strengthening cooperation and bringing a merger closer.
From a provincial point of view, the cooperation between the two parties is even greater in Zeeland than in Brabant. In that province, the parties go together on one electoral list. But apart from Zeeland, Brabant is ‘as far as I know, the only province where PvdA and GroenLinks have agreed to only go to college together or not’, says Deckers.
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