Elections!

Last Wednesday was an important day in The Netherlands, as we had our long awaited elections! On Tuesday, Dylan and I were biking in the city centre, and everyone was last-minute campaigning to convince anyone who had not decided yet. We thought it was really funny to see what they came up with. The Socialist Party (SP) was giving out SPonges, little red sponges in the shape of their logo. We thought it was hilarious, so we got one, then biked on and waited until they came again, then got more, haha! We also have a lot of flyers and I was even filmed by a camera crew. Everyone in our building had posters on their doors, which were of course soon violated with permanent markers. All well, college kids… 

 Wednesday morning I woke up, and checked my facebook. My mother had send me a message, asking me if I had my own voting card. (In The Netherlands everyone who is allowed to vote gets an invitation card that you have to bring along.) That worried me, because I thought she had kept mine with hers. I called her and she told me she had lost mine, it wasn’t where she thought she’d put it. She had spend a long time looking for it. Of course, I was very upset (I might even have cried a little…) because it was my first time voting and I’d been looking forward to it for a while. I had done a lot of research into everyone’s program, (which is a lot of work, considering we have about 10 major parties) so I was quite upset. In the evening, after my choir rehearsal, we went to Pijnacker to vote. Even though I couldn’t use my own vote, my mother told me that she would vote for whatever party I chose. After careful consideration with Dylan, I picked one and we went to the building. After coloring the right box red, we went home to watch the first results on television.

They announced that the counting of the votes was public, and we didn’t know that. My dad suggested we’d go back to the place we voted at, to see how they do that. There was no one else, besides the people counting, so we weren’t sure if we could actually go in or not. We decided to give it a shot, and the leader told us that he had never see that happening before, people coming over to watch, haha! They just put all the votes for one party on a heap and count them about 10 times to be sure. We went back home for the first official results, the two biggest parties both got over 40 seats, which meant we had a majority of only two parties for the first time in a lot of years! That was really interesting to see, now they have to  start the formation, so we won’t know who is going to form the cabinet yet. That will be exciting!