Then we started to lobby the political parties. We very consciously decided the order in which we were involving them in our campaign – if you have one party inside, you’re almost sure that you can get the next. We first got the small progressive and populist parties inside the alliance. We held regular meetings with the local party leaders to make sure that everybody kept supporting the common strategy. Then, step by step, we went to work on the Social Democrats. They are the biggest party in Amsterdam and in the executive for over a century. We were very lucky with the Social Democratic council spokesperson, a former activist who was sceptical at first, but became enthousiastic and an ardent supporter of our goal. We made sure we had many prominent Social Democratic persons in our Advisory Group.

One of us ran into the new national Social Democrat party leader at a political event, was bold enough to go up to him, and enlisted his support too. We also had plain luck. The local Social Democratic leader, an investment banker, who was sceptical at first, was convinced by his young daughter who had lessons at school about ancient Greek democracy, and said: "Daddy, your work sounds very boring compared to this." Nevertheless, there was fierce resistance inside the Social Democratic fraction. We really had to negotiate the rules point by point to enlist the support of enough council members. We had to concede a minimal turnout threshold of 20 percent of the voters – we checked and it appeared that of all 100 local referendums ever held in the Netherlands, this percentage had always been obtained. We also had to concede the same (rather big) list of excluded topics as the existing facultative referendum had. However, internally, the social democrats could still not unite themselves on a common standpoint. Together we held a conference on which Andreas Gross, the Swiss MP and then Council of Europe vice president, spoke in favour of our proposal. At this conference we could announce that just enough local council members had signed our "Contract with Amsterdam", an ancient-looking document presented by an actor dressed up as a 17th Century Amsterdam autocratic ruler, who came to admit that he had seen it all wrong and stood up from his grave to become a democrat. In the "Contract with Amsterdam" the council member promised to vote in favour. The conference was a big success.

In the end, 12 of 15 Social Democrat council members voted in favour. At the last moment, the populists withdrew their support, and it was how it has always been in the Netherlands: the left in favour, the right against. The council hereby ordered the mayor to write a local regulation. The mayor had argued against, but he could not ignore the enthusiasm which had spread throughout the council and the city, and he conceded that the members of Amsterdams Initiatief would be consulted on the drafting of the regulation. When the first draft came, we were disappointed. It was a hotchpotch and a bad interpretation of the council decision. We wrote a critique and proposed an alternative draw-up for the regulation. It was accepted and finally approved by the council. This time, the entire council voted in favour, because the Mayor had correctly carried out the order by the council. It went into effect in October 2004.

Now we are more than a year further. There has been only one initiative yet: it was rejective (trying to block a council decision), and when the initiative was declared invalid on technical grounds, the initiators stopped the effort. This is frustrating for the members of Amsterdams Initiatief, we hoped on more initiatives, but we decided we have done our part of the job and disbanded the group. It is now up to the citizens of Amsterdam.

Annex: The rules of the Amsterdam system, including the concessions to the Social Democrats