The Party for the Animals in North Holland wants to get rid of the straitjacket of a boarded-up coalition agreement based on party interests. Instead, the party advocates a freer form of governance, in which votes can be cast on a subject-by-issue basis. Is this feasible in our province?
“We want to see how we can loosen up the classic relationships of coalition and opposition,” says Party for the Animals leader Ines Kostić. So no coalition agreement that is fixed for four years. But looking for a majority in the Provincial Council per subject.
Limburg has governed the province in this way for the past four years. Even when the council resigned due to an integrity scandal, it continued with this so-called ‘extra-parliamentary’ provincial government. This form cannot be ruled out for the next four years either, writes L1.
Disasters and riots
Will something like this also work for North Holland? According to Arno Korsten, emeritus professor of Public Administration, such a loose form of governance works well in the situation we now find ourselves in, a so-called ‘risk society’. Korsten: “That is if there are constant sudden circumstances, disasters, riots, food crises, power cuts, a cabinet that is under the influence of Europe.”
“If there is a new climate policy from the cabinet, you as a province have to go along again. And what do you do with your sealed agreement?”
In North Holland you can think of the sudden consequences of the war in Ukraine, such as the refugee flow and the problems with the supply of gas and other raw materials.
Korsten also mentions climate policy: “It is now said that the earth may warm up more than the 1.5 degrees now mentioned, and that calls for more measures. If that is embraced by the cabinet, you as a province have to go along again. do you have to agree?”
Strong drivers
A condition for a more open form of governance, according to Korsten: ‘strong deputies’. “You have to be good at content, be able to debate, defend, argue, read and know which things are politically difficult so that you can bend along. And that is not for everyone.”
“You have to see for each issue whether you can drag it through the Provincial Council, and then you have to come from a good family”
Because administrators cannot fall back on their sacred cows with a looser agreement, as with agreements that have already been settled in a sealed coalition agreement. That also means that a kind of cement is missing, says Korsten. “There are no longer any ‘Bible stories’ that members of the Executive Board can fall back on, just to name a metaphor. The policy will then be more capricious, and that requires alertness. drag, and then you must come from a good family.”
‘Complicated’
Such new forms of governance have already been tried at municipal level. For example, Bergen now governs on the basis of an agreement on behalf of all parties, instead of just those from the coalition.
Such a ‘council-wide’ agreement was also concluded in Enkhuizen in the past, because the formation of a coalition failed at the time. There has since returned to the ‘old politics’, partly after the resignation of an alderman who found governing without a coalition ‘complicated’.
Guts
The Party for the Animals thinks ‘anything is possible’. “It’s mainly a matter of guts,” says Kostić. In the first conversation she already noticed that the BoerBurgerBeweging (BBB) with ‘classic’ questions the scout came, who would “set any old-fashioned party.” “We have BBB asked to think more creatively about forms of collaboration, because I think it’s important that we don’t automatically fall into that very hard ‘coalition/opposition’.
Kostić is therefore concerned about the choice of Ankie Broekers-Knol as a scout. “Because she really comes from the ‘old politics’. But I hope she surprises us.”