Saudi Arabia Elects 19 Women To Local Councils In Landmark Polls

One was elected in the Eastern Province and one in Jiddah, said General Election Commission’s media council head Hamad Al-Omar.

Saturday’s municipal poll, which was hailed by many as historic, saw a turnout of about 25 percent, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Riyadh Saad al-Saadi reported.

Women are banned from driving and must cover themselves in public in the conservative kingdom, which was the world’s last country to give its women the right to vote.

The preliminary results to Saturday’s elections were announced by local districts in a ceremony, followed by a news conference and publication on the official Saudi Press Agency. There were around 978 women candidates alongside 5,938 men vouching for 284 seats. Their duties on municipal councils will be limited to local affairs including responsibility for streets, public gardens and rubbish collection. “Three of them are woman and 17 are men (in Riyadh) and we are very glad for these results”. “While moving in the right direction, Saudi Arabia is moving far too slowly”.

“In principle, all Saudi women can obtain ID cards without asking anyone else’s permission”, Adam Coogle of Human Rights Watch explained. The event comes after the 2005 and 2011 polls in which only men were allowed to participate.

“The participation of women represents an important step forward in Saudi Arabia toward a more inclusive electoral process that will ensure all citizens are represented in a government accountable to all Saudi citizens”, State Department spokesman John Kirby said in a statement”. Twenty female candidates won one percent of around 2,100 available municipal council seats. An additional 1,050 seats are appointed with approval from the king. 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. Also, allowing women to vote and campaign shows how the government is willing to take steps that are counter to the wishes of religious hardliners, with whom officials must engage in a careful balancing act.

She told the European Union ceremony that the total number of elected women was “maybe below our expectations”, but the fact that there were 979 candidates was heartening.

Municipal council members do not hold much power in Saudi Arabia, where all major decisions are made by King Salman and his hand-picked cabinet.