At the end of three days of intensive campaigning, it came down to a rather nerve-wracking final hour of the thirty-sixth Annual Congress of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats in Europe (ALDE). Hands had been shaken, delegations lobbied and speeches made, and all that was left was the minor matter of the actual voting.
As I have previously noted, ALDE has a quirky voting system - first past the post with a twist - the twist being that voters must vote for as many candidates as there are vacancies. This can potentially lead to a situation whereby you are obliged to vote for a candidate you don't like much, simply to make up your slate. Failure to cast the right number of votes leads to the rejection of all of your choices - an unwelcome problem to have.
The first vote was for the Presidency, with voters given the choice of voting for Siim Kallas or Hans van Baalen. I had thought that it might be close, with both sides throwing caution to the wind in their attempts to persuade voters, but in the end, van Baalen won by a very clear margin indeed.
What did that mean for the Vice-Presidential race? Firstly, it meant an extra vacancy to be filled, meaning that there would be six winners, not five, as van Baalen was already a serving Vice-President himself. However, it meant that voters were faced with having to pick an extra candidate to support, although more prescient delegations had probably given the matter some thought anyway.
The next complication was the means of voting, an electronic voting pad which required each of the six votes to be cast separately, which offered boundless opportunities for confusion. However, eventually, the voting procedure was complete, and I took my place in a small room away from the congress hall with my fellow observers, one for each campaign.
It quickly became clear that there had been significant numbers of spoiled ballots - seventy-one out of four hundred and twenty-nine. Voters choosing the same candidate more than once, or not casting all six votes, meant that I was wondering, "Have our voters got it right?". The numbers were announced for each candidate, each observer confirmed their acceptance, and I took the opportunity to offer our thanks to the Returning Officers and to Didrik de Schaetzen, who had co-ordinated the election on behalf of the ALDE Party secretariat, for their efforts, before we returned to our candidates.
Then, the announcement, with the results simultaneously screened for the Congress to see. Ros had won fairly handily, getting 73% of the valid votes cast, and coming third overall. Elected with her were Marcus Löning from the FDP, Germany, Ilhan Kyuchuyk from the MRF, Bulgaria, (probably the first Muslim Bureau member ever), Timmy Dooley from Fianna Fáil, Ireland, Marta Pascal from Convergencia, Catalonia, and Fredrick Federley, from Centerpartiet, Sweden.
The campaign was over, a victory had been gained, and a future unlocked. We took the International Office team off for a glass of champagne to mark the result, but mostly as a small thank you for the work that they had done to make it possible.
I am very proud of Ros. She ran a campaign which was true to her values, stuck to the issues and was about doing things rather than being things. I have every confidence that she will do the Liberal Democrats proud during her term of office, and that she will, eventually, leave the ALDE Party stronger than it was when she arrived. And that, when all is said and done, is what politics is all about.
As for me, it seems that I am a (Vice-)Presidential consort again, at least for two years. For Saffron Walden, read Vilnius, presumably... it could be a lot of fun...
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