It’s all just 1’s and 0’s…

A couple of days ago we had a Mayor Referendum in Utrecht. This meant that we, the people, were asked to vote for a new mayor for our city. Well, vote is not the right word, the city counsel would have the ultimate decision, so we were asked to select a mayor. Well, select is not completely the right word, because we could only pick from two preselected candidates. And picking, that was kind of hard too, the two candidates are from the same party (Labour), they look almost the same, and they agreed on the most significant points. This lead to people painting words on the promotional material (taken by eti):

“Lood om oud ijzer”, translates literally to “Trading lead for old iron”, roughly meaning “six or half a dozen”. And when you think about it: the candidates did not even have a poster campaign of their own…

The result of the referendum was kind of predictable, only 9.25% bothered to vote in this charade, and more than 16% of those votes was either blank or invalid.

The most sad thing of this whole situation is that based on this charade, the political parties are now concluding that the people do not care, and that the referendum should be abolished. What a great way to end the national week of democracy.