Woman wins council seat in historic Saudi Arabia polls

Women in Saudi Arabia have cast their votes for the first time in the country’s history for municipal elections.

As many as 1,486,477 female and male voters were eligible to cast vote to choose 6,440 candidates in the municipal elections which closed at 05:00 p.m.

Speaking to Al Jazeera hours before polls opened, several women said they felt excited and positive that women are participating, with the hope that society as a whole would benefit from more diversity in public affairs leadership.

However, while women’s suffrage has in many other countries been a transformative moment in the quest for gender equality, its impact in Saudi Arabia is likely to be more limited due to a wider lack of democracy and continued social conservatism. Saudi women already account for the majority of university students in the country, and many increasingly test the boundaries of male-centric traditions.

Women’s participation could not have occurred without clearance from the religious hierarchy, which gives Saudi Arabia’s Western-allied leaders the moral authority to rule over Islam’s holiest sites.

Turnout was high, state media reported.

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy with some of the world’s tightest restrictions on women, including a ban on driving.

As one observer wrote on Facebook, “Don’t be fooled”.

The kingdom’s first municipal ballot in 2005 was for men only. Tears came to my eyes when I showed my son, 13, the HBO depiction of America’s suffragettes, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns in “Iron Jawed Angels”. “I think I have done the winning by running”. “Women are partners of men”. “We support anything that does not violate syariah (Islamic law)”, he said.

Indeed, today’s vote, with all of its restrictions, is emblematic of the country’s repressive interpretation of sharia. The concept of “wasta” – roughly, Arabic for “who you know” – is always a factor in Saudi life, said Afit, a 32-year-old health-care worker.

And today, the government of Saudi Arabia continues to ignore the pleas of the Saudi friends, journalists and family of Ashraf Fayadh, a gentle young Palestinian poet and artist sentenced last month to death for trumped-up charges of alleged “apostasy”.

At a news conference, the official who oversaw the election said Saudi society was ready for women’s inclusion.

“Now women have a voice”, Ms Awatef Marzooq said after casting her ballot at a school in the capital. She was running against seven men and two women.

According to estimates 978 women and 5,938 men registered as candidates for the 3,159 seats at 284 municipal councils across the kingdom. That is a ratio of 10:1.

Abdullah also appointed 30 women in the Shura Council before his death. During the campaign period, female nominees could not address male voters and had to either present their programs from behind a partition, relying on projectors and microphones, or through male assistants and relatives. That meant little to the women trickling in to vote: some with even their entire faces veiled, others testing limits with head scarves pushed back to allow hair to spill out and wearing bedazzled sneakers.