Olten City Council Elections – The railway city continues to be ruled by the left-wing green – News

• Thomas Marbet (SP, until now) and Marion Rauber (SP, until now) manage to be re-elected in the first vote. Surprisingly, Benvenuto Savoldelli (FDP, so far) has to compete again, he missed the absolute most.
• Raphael Sommer (Greens, new) was already elected in the first ballot and thus defends the green seat in the city government. The city government thus remains dominated by the green left.
• All other candidates must move to a second ballot.

The starting position for the Olten city council elections was exciting: nine people are running for the five seats in city government. With City President Martin Wey (CVP) and City Councilor Iris Schelbert (Greens) no longer running for re-election, there were two vacancies.

The commoners hoped that after eight years they would be able to regain most of the green left. However, this hope was dashed after the first vote.

It was clearly left in the lead in the first vote.

The former Thomas Marbet (SP) and Marion Rauber (SP) managed to be re-elected. Green Raphael Schär-Sommer was also elected on the first ballot. This means that the left-wing parties still have three seats in the five-member city government.

The political left almost achieved a real coup: the former representative of the FDP, Benvenuto Savoldelli, narrowly lost the absolute majority in the first vote (2309 votes). It was even done by Nilsaken, who was responsible for the new group “Olten now!” It begins, beaten (2616 votes), that the absolute majority was lost by a few votes.

Legend:

The choice for the five council seats is wide. Eight men and one woman are running for office.

SRF / Andreas Brandt

CVP candidate Beat Felber also missed the election on the first ballot. He was supposed to defend the seat of former mayor Martin Wey, but now he also has to go to the second ballot. This will take place on April 25.

David Plüss (FDP) has a remarkable 2,000 votes, and independent Thomas Rauch has a good 1,700 votes. The former FDP man tried to make the jump to city government four years ago, but ended far behind.

Rolf Sommer, who has been a member of the SVP cantonal council for 20 years and repeatedly draws attention to himself with municipal referendums, for example on the closure of the crematorium, has the fewest votes. However, Sommer is not an official candidate for Olten’s Senior Vice President.