Call me an obnoxious bigot, but here’s a suggestion. Instead of a queue of mostly male Tory leadership candidates getting their knickers in a twist about who is or isn’t a feminist, how about… electing more women who could take part in the race?
After years of watching politicians dodge balls like female quotas or all-female candidate lists, a grassroots campaign in the Netherlands has come up with a simple idea. Understand your political system and use your vote better.
The Stem op een Vrouw (Vote for a woman) group has been working since 2017 to encourage the country’s 17 million people not just to vote for any old woman. Instead, it suggests ‘hacking’ its preferential voting system, a form of proportional representation where voters choose a candidate from a national list, and those with enough ‘preference’ votes leapfrog their own party’s selection to be first in line for a seat.
The Netherlands is surprisingly unrepresentative for a famously liberal country where women won the same voting rights as men in 1919
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