boss This is a leader. The editor expresses the position of the newspaper.
For two of Agder’s municipalities, Kvenisdal and Fleckfjord, we’ve given readers their opinion on who should become mayor. In Kvensdal, the result is relatively clear: most people would like Per Sverre Kvnlog (KrF) to be the municipality’s biggest political leader. He received 34 percent of the nearly 2,000 total votes cast. Arne Rygh (Frp) got 24 percent of the vote, while Ahmet Lindov (AP) came in third with 17 percent of the vote.
In FLEKKEFJORD the situation is much clearer. The incumbent mayor, Torbjørn Klungland (Frp), currently has 69 percent of the vote. Sigurd Brueghel (H) has eight percent of the support, while Arne Berkedal (KrF) has seven percent of the vote. Almost 3,000 people cast their ballots. This counts as an electoral landslide, if the numbers are real. And to some extent they are. These are the votes of the participants who sit on one vote each. It wasn’t like in the past that you could rally people across the country. In this sense, there are, admittedly, with some margins of error, numbers that tell us quite a bit about mood.
It is a point that the incumbent mayor will always get some extra votes. People don’t like change. They would like to have a file. But it must be said that achieving 69 percent of the vote is much higher than one might expect. This gives another signal to politicians who are in no way tied to the number of votes and support. It is the case that the mayor’s office and gang committees are largely decided through closed-room negotiations. We think it is fundamentally wrong. It would be reasonable for the mayor to be chosen based on the number of votes – not Agder’s poll, but the number of votes the best individual candidate receives. Then the voters will have more influence over who should run the mayor’s club.
In our opinion, one should try to revitalize local politics and local elections by finding alternative ways to elect a mayor. One idea might be that whoever gets the most votes also has the responsibility of finding the majority, so that the respective mayor has political influence. The latter was precisely Clungland’s problem for four years, being elected mayor almost by accident.
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