#UvAStudentElections: five parties compete in election Central Student Council
From 13 May, a total of eleven student parties will be competing for votes while no fewer than five parties will compete for seats in the direct election for the Central Student Council.
Never before have so many parties competed for the fourteen seats of the Central Student Council (the ‘CSR’). Seven of these will be elected directly by UvA students and the remaining seven will go to delegates from the seven faculty student councils. The five parties running for seats in the direct election are UvASociaal, De Vrije Student, Red UvA, Inter and Slaafs.
Of the five, it is the first time Inter and Slaafs have participated. Inter, primarily a platform for students of the interdisciplinary Politics, Psychology, Law & Economics (PPLE) with a focus on international students, has previously only participated in elections at the Law Faculty. Slaafs (the slogan of which runs ‘honest, simple, beer’), was previously only active in the Science Faculty. Slaafs leader Parcival Maissan: ‘By means of free beer, we try to stay in touch with our voters and make the council year fun for everyone.’
Course lists
Course lists are new this year, meaning that some courses within a faculty form a separate constituency. This is the case with PPLE, for example, which formed its own constituency within the Law Faculty. This means that within PPLE, only the Inter party will participate with the consequence that PPLE-students will only be able to vote for Inter while other law students will only be able to vote for De Vrije Student and OpRecht.
The situation is similar at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences (the ‘FMG’). The four departments within the faculty (Social Sciences, Psychology, Communication Science and Child Development & Education (‘CDE’)) each have their own constituency. Of these, elected members will form the faculty student council. CDE-students, however, cannot vote for the faculty student council because no CDE-candidates have registered for the faculty student council and they cannot vote for students from another course. The two seats on the council reserved for CDE–students will be distributed between the other courses within the new council. CDE-students will, however, be able to vote for the CSR.
Usual suspects
At the faculty level, the usual suspects will be participating: Lief (Science), List Sefa (Economics & Business), MFAS (Medicine), Tof (Humanities) and Kies Acta (Dentistry). And then there is Red UvA, considered an ‘anti-party’ in which candidates participate not to win seats, but to ridicule the participation system. It is a policy amongst elected Red UvA candidates not to attend CSR meetings.
Folia will publish a special paper edition in the week prior to the elections and during. This will be distributed at the various campuses. The student council elections take place from 13 to 17 May.
