Liberi wins election, OUR Erasmus highest new entrant

The remaining seats will be filled by members of the Erasmus Student Coalition (up from two to three seats, with slightly fewer votes than OUR) and the Progressive Student Party (retains two seats).

OUR Erasmus is a new party, founded with the idea of representing all study associations on the council. Its council members are not entirely new: number two on the list, Timo Zandvliet, is currently on the council on behalf of the Erasmus Alliance and is going up for his third year as a councillor. The Alliance is currently the largest party on the council, but will disappear altogether after the summer, when the new council term starts.

Like last year, the largest party will disappear from the council completely. The Erasmus Alliance (currently on four seats) only listed one candidate, and he was not re-elected. Last year, Aeffix also disappeared while it was the largest party, with five seats on the council at the time. The concept of independent councillors seems entirely passé: like last year, all elected candidates are members of a party.

Liberi candidate Reinier van Woerden won by far the most votes. As many as 594 votes were cast for him, almost twice as many as for his party leader Nawin Ramcharan. Asked for an explanation, the Public Administration student referred to ‘an enthusiastic campaign by Liberi, in which everyone worked very well together’. As for how he polled twice as many votes as Ramcharan, he could not say. Perhaps his membership of student association Navigators was a factor in this.

With Liberi, Van Woerden wants to push for ‘more voting rights for students and for academic freedom, which is in a bad state in the Netherlands, according to a recent European Commission report’. “I want to congratulate everyone who won a seat and I hope for a great cooperation. It is great to see that a record number of students stood for election”, he concludes.

Just over 4,000 votes were cast this year, representing 9.8 per cent of students eligible to vote. This was higher than last year, when the turnout was 8.7 per cent. This confirms the upward trend in turnout over the past few years.