Saudi women vote for the first time in landmark election

Saudi women are heading to polling stations across the kingdom on Saturday, both as voters and candidates for the first time in this landmark election. Nearly 1,000 women are standing for election, and around 130,000 women have registered to vote – compared to 1.35 million male voters.

While the vote is seen as a small step forward for the ultra-conservative nation, very few people believe any women will actually be elected.

Even amidst this symbolic progress, the kingdom still holds a strict policy of gender segregation, which requires women running to only address male voters from behind a partition, because of laws against women addressing men.

The Islamist monarchy, where woman are banned from driving and must cover themselves from head to toe in public, was the last country in the world where only men were allowed to vote.

“Saudi women have faced significant obstacles in their fight for their right to vote and run in the municipal council elections, but their participation on December 12 will send a strong signal to Saudi society that women are continuing the long march toward greater participation in public life”, said Sarah Leah Whitson, the Middle East director for Human Rights Watch, in a statement released on Monday.

Polls open on Saturday at 8am and close at 5pm, with counting the following day. However, despite women contesting and voting in local elections, they were not allowed to directly meet majority male voters during their election campaign, Al Jazeera reported.

Um Mohammed, a 47-year-old woman living near the Kuwaiti border, said her daughters helped organise the campaign of a female candidate, but she herself would back a man.

But one-third of council seats are appointed by the Municipal Affairs Ministry, leaving women optimistic that they will at least be assigned some of them.

No woman can travel without the consent of a male family member known as a guardian.

And a resident of north-eastern Saudi Arabia, who asked not to be named, said the female candidate she wanted to vote for withdrew after local Islamic scholars objected.