In the university council, there are ten seats for students. This time NovUM and Dope both grabbed four, Kan Party one and List Lex-Motus also one. Students from NovUM will be found in all faculty councils from September. Dope did not succeed in that. Although the party will be present in a large number of faculty councils - very powerful in the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life sciences (FHML) with seven seats - Dope is missing representatives in the faculties Arts and Social Sciences and Science and Engineering (in the latter they had not submitted a list).
Notable in the FHML council: the return of Olga Kosjakova of NovUM. This year, she repeatedly raised the language issue in her faculty council. The working language is Dutch, but the Czech Biomedical Sciences student does not speak and understand Dutch. The FHML council decided that the situation would not be changed, but that Kosjakova could ask her questions in English. Still, she is not satisfied and still hopes for a "workable solution", she said during a university council meeting in January. Whether English will be spoken in the FHML council next academic year remains to be seen.
Just before the start of the elections (22-25 April), KAN Party published an open letter on Instagram saying that "major electoral malpractice" had taken place during the UM election debate. A board member of competing party NovUM supposedly had great influence behind the scenes, according to KAN. Moreover, KAN thinks that it is “plausible” that this person informed fellow party members of the debate topics beforehand, while the other participants were only told about them twenty minutes before the start of the debate.The central election office regrets the "appearance of a conflict of interest" because, yes, a NovUM member was involved behind the scenes, as a student assistant, but with whom "good arrangements were made". The office does not believe the elections were manipulated.
Students (academic and support staff serve two-year terms) were allowed to vote this year; less than a fifth of all Maastricht students did so. The FHML had the highest turnout with 26 per cent. The School of Business and Economics dangled at the bottom: 12.8 per cent.
There were also elections for service councils, but only ICTS had elections. At the other service councils, there were fewer candidates than seats.