‘Slaafs - more beer, less AFS’ and fifteen other parties will participate in the UvA student councils election
A session of the central electoral committee shows that sixteen electoral parties, including well known names, well known parties, some new parties and some anti-system parties, are determined to be elected for this year’s student councils election.
To start with the electoral lists of the seven direct mandates of the Central Student Council (in Dutch, the ‘CSR’), where four parties will participate: De Decentralen, UvA Sociaal, De Vrije Student and Ons kritisch alternatief (Ons). The party leaders of each of these are, respectively, Sebastian Proos, Ken Chew, Guido Bakker and Ruud van der Veen.
Joris van Wouden is once again one of the candidates of the anti-system party, Ons. Van Wouden: ‘If elected, we will participate on the basis of the ‘abstinence’ principle, which means that we will not attend any of the meetings but will donate our governance scholarships to social organisations’.
Ons is not the only party that wants to mobilise the counter vote: the party ‘Slaafs - more beer, less AFS’ has as its leading principle the promise that the party will abstain from all meetings of the student council for the Science Faculty unless there’s voting to be done: specifically, a vote on merging the Science Faculty of the UvA with the two Science Faculties of the VU.
‘If this is the case we will attend and vote against the merger or any further collaboration with the VU,’ says party leader Parcival Maissan. ‘Slaafs’ is a contraction of ‘Sla AFS’, meaning ‘hit the AFS’. The AFS is the former planned merger of the Science Faculties of UvA and the VU.
New parties
Apart from some eccentric new parties from the Science Faculty (three in total), there are also some new parties from the other faculties. At the Faculty of Humanities the single candidate party Roede will participate with Thijs Binnenkade. At the Law Faculty there is the new party called Inter.
Many former candidates and party leaders will participate again, sometimes as lowest-placed candidates, e.g. Naomi Appelman, Alex Tess Rutten, Jarmo Berkhout and Lianne Hooijmans. The election for the new student councils will take place from 10 May 10 - 16 May.
