Natalie Delgadillo: Independent candidates’ slate affiliations still apparent

After student government election results were announced Friday, The Daily Bruin tweeted that there was now an independent plurality on council – six councilmembers that had no affiliation with any slate.

Technically, that is true.

Every candidate that ran for the two open positions in this fall’s special election ran as an “independent,” ostensibly unaffiliated with either of the two large slates that have dominated Undergraduate Students Association Council elections for the past two years: LET’S ACT! and Bruins United.

But, like most “technical” truths, that doesn’t get to the heart of the issue.

Negeen Sadeghi-Movahed and Sofia Moreno Haq won the transfer representative and general representative 2 seats, respectively. They ran a joint campaign, describing that partnership in a recent submission to the Daily Bruin as “joining forces.”

Michelle Balatbat and Youmun Alhlou, the losing candidates for transfer representative and general representative 2, also ran together.

But I’m puzzled about something, and I’m sure I’m not alone: What does it mean to “run together” when you’re also supposedly running an independent campaign?

All of the candidates running independently said they chose to do so to avoid dragging slate politics into an election so early in the year. This was particularly salient for the new transfer representative position, which all candidates claimed to want to keep out of the dirty mess that slates have often created for student government offices and initiatives.

But if there’s one thing we should all acknowledge, it’s that there was but one independent candidate that ran in this election: Allan Kew, a candidate for the transfer representative position, who has only been at UCLA since the start of this school year and did not partner up with anyone to campaign.

Every other candidate, despite claims to the contrary, has woefully obvious slate affiliations that determined the shape of their campaigns and, for those who won, will likely determine the shape of their offices.

Sadeghi-Movahed and Moreno Haq were vocally and unequivocally supported by LET’S ACT! councilmembers, just as Alhlou and Balatbat were supported by Bruins United councilmembers. When Sadeghi-Movahed and Moreno Haq take office, those alliances aren’t going to dissipate, and it seems to me that new alliances – across the aisle, so to speak – aren’t likely to form.

There’s nothing wrong with the fact that LET’S ACT! now has an obvious, if not technical, majority on the council table.

But let’s be honest about what we’re looking at here: slate affiliation is slate affiliation, whether candidates want to name it or not.