First Women Elected to Public Office in Saudi Arabia

17 women have won municipal councils seat in the country’s first ever election open to female voters and candidates.

The mayor of Mecca, Osama al-Bar, said Salma al-Oteibi won in an area called Madrakah, about 150 kilometers north of Islam’s holiest site.

A Saudi woman casts her ballot in an election centre in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, on December 12, 2015.

Officials said around 130,000 women had registered to vote compared with 1.35 million men, and 978 women and 5,938 men had registered as candidates. There was also complete separation between men and women at events during the campaign, with female candidates required to speak from behind a partition or have a man speak on her behalf.

Saudi Arabia is the only country that bans women from driving and requires its female citizens to provide a male guardian’s approval for such basic matters as traveling, working and studying.

Saudi women took to twitter to highlight this momentous occasion, Amal Faisal tweeted “I just voted for the 1 time in my life!”

Rasha Hefzi, who won her seat in Jeddah, said: “The presence of a woman in the council now will mean she can have access to some of the files that were previously inaccessible to some women in the past”. The Eastern Province, where minority Shiia are concentrated, saw two women elected, said Hamad Al-Omar, who heads the General Election Commission’s media council to local media.

Another one-third of seats will be appointed, and activists are pushing for strong female representation in the selection.

In Qassim, traditionally the most conservative part of the country, two women were elected but their names were not immediately released. The election marked the first time women have been allowed to stand for elections in the conservative Islamic nation, according to the Associated Press.

Speaking at a panel held by the Women and Democracy Association (KADEM) on Saturday, Justice and Development Party (AK Party) Antalya deputy Gökcen Özdoğan Enç claimed that there’s something wrong even though women were granted the right to vote in Turkey in 1934.

The monarch, who died in January, ordered that 20% of the members of the kingdom’s consultative Shura Council be women. And now women will also have a power in the municipal council.