Election Campaign
In July 2023, the Dutch government collapsed due to disagreements on migration policy. Until the elections in November 2023, we started an election campaign to make freedom of movement a stronger focus of political parties and in the public debate. We aimed to positively influence the party programmes, strengthen changemakers within political parties and inform the public about the consequences of these elections for migrants.
Following this, we drafted a party programme listing concrete steps to abolish borders, put an end to border violence and to create equal treatment for migrants and locals. We shared this programme with several political parties who were writing their election programmes.
We are proud to inform you that six political parties implemented (parts of) our party programme. BIJ1, PvdD and Volt particularly made significant use of our input. We also found specific party members who signed our manifesto and mobilised them by organising an action day where we discussed our programme points and to see how we could draw them into the public discourse. We found that within Groenlinks/PvdA, a large group of members wanted to file amendments to their migration policies in the long run. Volt members also filed amendments.
For this campaign, we organised protests at the congresses of Volt and GroenLinks/PvdA. The latter had especially strong anti-migrant rhetoric and plans in their concept party programme, but due to pressure from party members, adopted multiple changes at the congress. Once the party programmes were final, we analysed the stances of the parties on border violence, (un)equal treatment of migrants and safe migration pathways. We published these on social media, our website, and newsletter.
To sum up our major findings and learnings from this campaign, we learned a lot about the positions of different political parties on immigration. Certain parties surprised us with their anti-immigration stances, whilst other parties who had previously been ambiguous on the issue embraced significant amendments (Volt, PvdD). BIJ1 included almost all of our suggestions and included the abolishment of borders as one of their main campaign goals. We were generally quite surprised but pleased to find out that party members were willing to listen to us and to incorporate our suggestions in their public programmes. We hope to continue our relationship with these party members to keep pushing political parties and influence elections and migration policy in the long run. While the election results were deeply disappointing and terrifying, we are happy with the knowledge that small left wing parties are able to implement a strong pro-migration stance in the opposition.
Following this, we drafted a party programme listing concrete steps to abolish borders, put an end to border violence and to create equal treatment for migrants and locals. We shared this programme with several political parties who were writing their election programmes.
We are proud to inform you that six political parties implemented (parts of) our party programme. BIJ1, PvdD and Volt particularly made significant use of our input. We also found specific party members who signed our manifesto and mobilised them by organising an action day where we discussed our programme points and to see how we could draw them into the public discourse. We found that within Groenlinks/PvdA, a large group of members wanted to file amendments to their migration policies in the long run. Volt members also filed amendments.
For this campaign, we organised protests at the congresses of Volt and GroenLinks/PvdA. The latter had especially strong anti-migrant rhetoric and plans in their concept party programme, but due to pressure from party members, adopted multiple changes at the congress. Once the party programmes were final, we analysed the stances of the parties on border violence, (un)equal treatment of migrants and safe migration pathways. We published these on social media, our website, and newsletter.
To sum up our major findings and learnings from this campaign, we learned a lot about the positions of different political parties on immigration. Certain parties surprised us with their anti-immigration stances, whilst other parties who had previously been ambiguous on the issue embraced significant amendments (Volt, PvdD). BIJ1 included almost all of our suggestions and included the abolishment of borders as one of their main campaign goals. We were generally quite surprised but pleased to find out that party members were willing to listen to us and to incorporate our suggestions in their public programmes. We hope to continue our relationship with these party members to keep pushing political parties and influence elections and migration policy in the long run. While the election results were deeply disappointing and terrifying, we are happy with the knowledge that small left wing parties are able to implement a strong pro-migration stance in the opposition.