Saudi voters elect 20 women candidates for the first time

Men have voted in the local elections since 2005 but this was the first time women could cast ballots and stand as candidates.

At least 17 women have won seats on city councils in Saudi Arabia in historic elections.

Al-Bar also confirmed through election officials in Saudi Arabia’s second largest city of Jiddah that another female candidate, Lama al-Suleiman, had won a seat there.

An appeals committee reversed her disqualification just two days before the end of campaigning, Nassima Al Sadah, a human-rights activist in the Gulf coast city of Qatif, said she had begun legal action over her own disqualification.

According to Saudi officials, only a bit over 130,000 women voted in the election, out of nearly 1.5 million people who registered to vote.

Female candidates could not meet face-to-face with male voters during campaigning, while neither men nor women could publish their pictures.

But it will not directly help end a ban on women driving – the only prohibition of its kind in the world – or the “guardianship” system, they said.

Women can vote – but there are some other restrictions that still apply to women in Saudi Arabia. In total, about 47 percent of registered voters took part in Saturday’s election. They require permission from male family members to travel, work or marry. Twenty of them have been elected to serve as municipal councilors, a largely ceremonial position in a government that remains an autocratic monarchy.

But she told AFP that any progress for Saudi women “will push to other developments in other areas” indirectly.

In 2013, he named women to the appointed Shura Council, which advises the cabinet.

What both women represent is something that is undeniable in modern Saudi Arabia, and that may yet prove more important in the long term than the weekend’s elections.

Dr Al Fassi described the outcome of the elections as a “a big success”.

Veiled Saudi women take photos of their children during a ceremony to celebrate Saudi Arabia’s Independence Day in Riyadh, September 23, 2009. There were also those who still have to be driven by men to polling centers because they are still not allowed to drive. Female candidates expressed pride in standing, even if they didn’t think they would win, while women voters said they were happy at finally being able to do something they had only seen on television or in movies. Female candidates ran on platforms promising more nurseries in order to offer longer daycare hours for working mothers.