Politics
The provincial council (Provinciale Staten) has 55 seats, and is headed by the Queen's Commissioner, currently Wim van de Donk. While the provincial council is elected by the inhabitants, the Commissioner is appointed by the Queen and the cabinet of the Netherlands. With 12 seats, People's Party for Freedom and Democracy is the largest party in the council, closely followed by Christian Democratic Appeal with 10 seats.
The daily affairs of the province are taken care of by the Gedeputeerde Staten, which are also headed by the Commissioner; its members (gedeputeerden) can be compared with ministers.
Read more about this topic: North Brabant
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“Our democracy, our culture, our whole way of life is a spectacular triumph of the blah. Why not have a political convention without politics to nominate a leader who’s out in front of nobody?... Maybe our national mindlessness is the very thing that keeps us from turning into one of those smelly European countries full of pseudo-reds and crypto-fascists and greens who dress like forest elves.”
—P.J. (Patrick Jake)
“Hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, politics or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies. Broadly speaking, there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly speaking, Corn-Pone stands for Self- Approval. Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other people. The result is Conformity.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)