GroenLinks in South Holland is having an external evaluation carried out into the way in which the list of candidates for the Provincial Council elections has been compiled. The party wants to ‘learn lessons from this for the future’.
The reason for this is the riot that arose on Tuesday around Debora Fernald. The South Holland Member of Parliament did not vote for her own party in the Senate elections, but for Volt. That eventually cost GroenLinks a seat in the Senate and gave Volt an extra seat.
Sinan Özkaya immediately expelled Fernald from Rotterdam from his group of six people after the elections in the provincial house in The Hague. She had been elected in the States with preferential votes more than two months earlier. Fernald was in tenth place on the list of candidates.
A day after she was expelled from the group, the Rotterdam woman said that she did not know that her vote would have so many consequences for the Senate. Fernald claims in several TV appearances that she was left out by the rest of the faction, that she was not given an explanation about the importance of the election and that she voted for Volt because the party wanted to help her.
GroenLinks emphasizes in a member email on Friday that they have put ‘a lot of time and energy’ into supporting the new Members of Parliament, including Fernald. They say that at various meetings much attention was paid to ‘both the voting process itself and the consequences of voting’.
It is not clear from the e-mail how the party intends to prevent members from voting dissident.
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