Last campaign day before city council elections tomorrow; Housing still main issue
Tomorrow, voters in almost all municipalities will go to the polls to elect the members of their municipal councils. Over 14.2 million eligible voters can cast their vote for one of 61,571 candidates in 340 municipalities.
The housing shortage was still the main topic of concern in this election campaign, and many election debates focused mainly on that topic. In Amsterdam on Monday evening, GroenLinks accused the D66 of only wanting to build homes for tech bros and bankers. D66 shot back that GroenLinks won’t even commit to a number of homes to build.
Safety also scored high as a topic of concern for voters this election. 39 percent of voters ranked safety as a top 3 issue in an Ipsos I&O poll, the same percentage as housing. The concern for safety is likely due to the increasingly unstable geopolitical situation.
There are also more local safety concerns. Local politicians, in particular, are facing more threats and aggression. In the run-up to this election, two candidates in Baarn had election posters in their front gardens defaced with a swastika and anti-LGBTQIA texts.
Immigration and asylum, a top-three issue in national politics for years, received much less attention in the local elections. Only 12 percent of voters mentioned this issue, making it only the 8th most important issue.
According to the polls, local parties and left-wing factions stand to gain in tomorrow’s election. This is partly due to far-right parties not participating in many municipalities, to the local parties’ benefit. A Kieskompas study showed that local parties attract mainly older, right-wing voters.
The number of local parties also grew again this election. One in six of the new parties is explicitly against opening an asylum shelter in their municipality, a campaign topic popular among the far-right parties.
Men are still overrepresented among the candidates running tomorrow, with only a third of candidates being female. Jan is again the most common name on the ballots. The top 50 contains only one woman’s name - Karin.
The ballots will also contain the names of six deceased candidates. These candidates died in recent weeks, after the parties already submitted their final candidate lists.
