Colorful list of Oberhausen Democrats

The Bunte Liste Oberhausen Democrats - in short: Bunte Liste (BL) - was a municipal electoral alliance that had four seats in the Oberhausen City Council from 1984 to 1994 .

The Bunte List, founded in the run-up to the local elections in 1984, saw itself “not as a party, but as an electoral association to the left of the SPD ”. In this association, members of the Greens , the DKP and the Democratic Socialists cooperated with non-party representatives of local citizens' groups and individuals.

When it ran for the first time, on September 30, 1984, the Bunte List immediately received 6.7 percent of the vote and was able to provide four city councilors. Five years later the alliance gained one percent of the vote and retained its parliamentary strength. It now had a seat in each of the three Oberhausen district representatives. In view of the absolute majority of the SPD on the council, the BL could not exert any significant influence on the local political decisions of Oberhausen, but its role as the mouthpiece and parliamentary arm of the local new social movements progeny.

In the interests of equal representation, the Bunte List tried to distribute its mandates evenly between the three parties involved and the group of its non-party members. As a representative of the Greens, the future North Rhine-Westphalian Environment Minister Bärbel Höhn was a member of the city council from 1985 to 1989 .

This alliance, which received attention beyond the city boundaries, was broken when the local elections in 1994 were being prepared. The Greens, who had strengthened their organization, wanted a clearer share in the joint project and initially favored a “two-pillar model” called the “Colorful List Voting Association” / Green “. Although this model was accepted with a narrow majority by non-green BL members in November 1993, the required qualified majority for an amendment to the statutes was not achieved in February 1994. The Oberhausen Greens now drew up a "green-open" list in which they offered half of the promising list places for the unorganized. Some of the non-party BL members made themselves available for this model, others rejected this approach. An application by the “green-open” wing to waive the election of the colorful list just missed a majority at its general meeting, so that the “greens” and “colorful” submitted separate lists. On August 30, 1994, the Greens and their supporters announced their exit from the faction of the Colorful List. In the election of October 16, 1994, the Greens were able to prevail with a share of the vote in the order of magnitude of the previous colorful list, while the remaining BL clearly failed because of the five percent hurdle and soon afterwards dissolved. Some of its former members who did not join the Greens are now active in local politics in the Left List . The previously shared “Colorful Shop” was taken over by the Green District Association as its office.

Election results

choice	be right	%	Seats
Local election 1984	6,735	6.7	4th
Local election 1989	7,408	7.7	4th
Local election 1994	2,407	1.8	0

Individual evidence

1. ^ Dietrich Behrends: 25th voice wanted with stable lanterns. The ups and downs of the Oberhausen council groups over the past 40 years. In: Oberhausen '88 - a yearbook , p. 52.
2. ↑ Sascha Unger: Green and Colorful: Break could be prevented . WAZ Oberhausen, November 11, 1993
3. ↑ Horst Pohlmann: The break is sealed. Green alternative left BL parliamentary group . NRZ Oberhausen, August 31, 1994