Local politics is having a hard time, is not popular and is not popular. In fact, most citizens have no idea what is going on at municipal level. More and more government tasks are being passed on to the municipality, unfortunately often accompanied by a tight financing pot. The municipality is continually challenged to attract people with sufficient expertise to be up to their task. Local politics also often has to do with less capable people who often represent local parties. Less capable people here means insufficient administrative skills and insight into the complexity of local government. There is a major difference in quality between aldermen and municipal councilors, which is not conducive to mutual relations. But yes, council and committee members are volunteers. To what extent can you expect them to know all the political ins and outs in addition to their day job?
Popularize politics?
Furthermore, local politics is unfortunately internally oriented, which means that the municipal council listens more often to colleagues and civil servants as well as to social organizations and interest groups. As a result, they do not show their faces to the outside world enough. A missed opportunity.
In local government, it should mainly be about finding pragmatic solutions to concrete problems, and populist slogans and one-liners are not appropriate. That is why initiatives by some municipalities to broadcast council meetings via the fiber optic network in order to reach a larger audience and interest them in politics seem doomed to failure in advance.
Dualism
A measure introduced in 2002 to make local government more popular is dualism. The daily management was transferred to the aldermen and the supervisory and framework-setting task to the municipal council, of which the aldermen were no longer a part. The position of the council was thus strengthened. And indeed the power of the alderman has been broken, but the council has not been presented more clearly to the citizen. The effect of dualism also depends on local values and traditions, which means that it is not equally noticeable in every municipality and has not had the same impact. Nobody wants to go back to the old system: there is more control because the council can now make a critical voice heard, which also carries weight, but unfortunately the gap with the citizen is still the same.
Involve citizens in politics.
But there is light on the horizon. The campaign that the government has been conducting since 2009 to get local politicians more involved with citizens is slowly starting to bear fruit. There are more and more initiatives to find tailor-made solutions for social problems close to the citizen. Initiatives to allow citizens to participate in politics and to allow that voice to carry weight, for example the citizens’ panel, city conversations, quality panel (where a random group of citizens periodically provides an opinion on the quality of municipal policy) . The underlying idea is that by truly involving citizens in decision-making about their living environment, they will gain more confidence in politics and government. But are citizens really motivated to delve into the political issues that play a role in their immediate environment? Or has the gap between citizens and politicians really become too great? The current gap must be closed, after all, democracy is at risk if citizens are no longer politically interested, so it is very much to be hoped that citizen involvement in local politics will be expanded and continued and will ultimately bear fruit. .