Ugbaad Kilincci, who was running for a council seat in Emmen as a member of the Dutch Labour party (PvdA), has been elected to the Emmen City Council via preferential votes.
The PvdA won seven seats in this week’s elections, which means that the top six candidates on their list would fill the seats. Dagblad van het Noorden reports that Kilincci, who was the party’s 12th place candidate, received 1,007 preferential votes.
Kilincci was in the news last week because she was the target of racist remarks while campaigning in the city. Kilincci, who is a Muslim woman and wears hijab, was born in Somalia and raised in the Netherlands. While campaigning this past weekend, she was called a “black monkey” and “towel-wearing retard.” Kilincci says that she was told by at least one person that she should “piss off back to Africa.”
“I remained friendly with them and told them that I don’t agree, and I told them to have a good day. But eventually, it got to be too much”, the Emmen resident said at the time.
Kilincci’s treatment was publicly denounced by the mayor of Emmen Eric van Oosterhout and by the national leader of the PvdA, Lodewijk Asscher. “We have to stop treating each other this way. We have to see each other as people and stand up for each other”, Asscher said.