Saudi Elections Are First to Include Women as Voters and Candidates
By BEN HUBBARD

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — There were no public debates, few campaign posters and no scandals. Candidates did not promote their platforms or undermine their rivals on television. And they risked disqualification for speaking to journalists.

But a small minority of Saudi citizens went to the polls on Saturday for a rare exercise in democracy, or at least its closest equivalent in a country ruled by an absolute monarch and according to Shariah law.

The elections for local councils across the kingdom were the first time that women were able to participate — as both voters and candidates — and rights activists lauded the move as further expanding the role of Saudi women in public life. The rules were largely the same for candidates of both genders.

“It is very important, with all its problems,” said Hatoon al-Fassi, a Saudi professor of women’s history, who helped organize workshops for female candidates until the government told her to stop. (It said the advice gave the women an unfair advantage, she said.)

“This is a big step that we are making the best of and that we are going to build on to ask for more rights,” Ms. Fassi said.

The elections come at a time of great social change in Saudi Arabia, a close ally of the United States. The political system remains closed and dominated by the royal family, and no one expects that average Saudis will soon play a role in choosing the officials — all men — who run their country’s economic, military and foreign affairs.

But the highly religious and conservative society is changing, with more women working outside the home, a large youth population and some of the world’s highest use of social media, making Saudis more acquainted with the rest of the world and eroding resistance to change.

The elections’ proponents acknowledge that few women, if any, are likely to win. But they see their participation as one small step in a gradual — some would say glacial — process of reform. While women are still barred from driving and are subject to so-called guardianship laws that keep them from marrying, traveling or receiving some medical procedures without the consent of a male relative, some rules are not enforced as strictly as before.

One sign of shifting attitudes toward female roles has been the limited criticisms by religious conservatives of women’s participation in the local councils, a move the previous monarch, King Abdullah, promised in 2011 and which the current king, Salman, allowed to proceed.

But interviews with a range of Saudis suggested that resistance to female participation was less common than old-fashioned voter apathy, which is rampant in a country with no history of competitive politics.

“Why would I vote?” asked Yezid al-Qahtani, a middle school teacher shopping in a Riyadh mall.

Unlike most people interviewed, he had registered for a previous election, and therefore could cast a vote, but did not plan to because he considered the councils ineffective.

“Who has the power to carry things out?” he asked. “Princes and ministers. That’s it.”

Saudi Arabia’s local councils handle municipal issues, and candidates focused on hyper-local concerns: streets, lighting, parks and medical facilities.

One female candidate in Riyadh, Haifa Alhababi, highlighted the importance of urban design, running a zero-waste campaign through social media about ways that her district could be improved.

Ms. Alhababi, an architecture professor, acknowledged that many voters would hesitate to vote for a woman, but said she had run partly “to give an example to the next generation.”

“There are a lot of men and women who are not happy to have a female candidate or for the females to have a voice, but our government is more advanced than the people,” she said.

Just under 1.5 million of Saudi Arabia’s roughly 20 million citizens have registered to vote, according to the election commission, and only 11 percent of them are women. Voters must be at least 18 and cannot be in the military. The commission lacks official statistics on the number of eligible voters.

The 6,900 candidates include 979 women competing for 2,112 seats on 284 local councils. Two-thirds of the councils’ members are elected, an increase from one-half in the last election. Another third are appointed by the government.

Saudi officials have called the elections democratic, but some Western scholars argue that the presence of pseudo-democratic institutions actually makes autocratic rulers more durable.

Rules imposed on the election campaign gave it a profoundly different flavor from the big-money, splashy campaigns common in the United States.

After a debate about whether women, who are not supposed to socialize with unrelated men, could use their photos on campaign materials, the government banned all candidates from using their photos, arguing that this promoted equality.

Candidates could not give interviews — again, because the government said that would unfairly benefit those with media connections.

Some candidates held campaign events, but since women could not meet male voters face-to-face, they spoke from behind partitions or via P.A. systems from separate rooms.

And in the run-up to the vote, some well-known activists had their candidacies rejected. One of them, Lujain al-Hathloul, who recently spent time in prison for trying to drive a car into the kingdom, appealed the decision and was allowed to run.

“I’m back in the game!” she wrote in a post on Twitter.

Few candidates complained about the regulations, as they are used to the kingdom’s strict rules on gender segregation.

“You are more important than your face,” said Randa Baraja, a female candidate in Riyadh.

Like many candidates, she complemented her public events with a social media campaign, she said. An online poll helped her to set priorities: a cultural center for youth, more child care for working mothers, and licenses for food and beverage carts.

She said women could serve their communities as well as men — if not better.

“Usually the female looks at the details,” she said. “She is picky, and follows up until things are done, so we think this will help the country.”

Voter turnout was low. Journalists and election workers clearly outnumbered voters during a visit to a Riyadh polling place organized by the Saudi Information Ministry.

On the men’s side, only seven voters came through in 35 minutes, one of them followed by eight photographers and cameramen.

A candidate who dropped by, Abdullah Alharbi, said he was a retired officer from the Ministry of Defense and wanted to make life better in his community.

He did not oppose working with female colleagues, he said, as long as it was done “within the principles of Shariah.”

By midafternoon, only a few dozen voters had come to a polling place for women in north Riyadh, an election worker there said. Four police cars were parked out front, and occasionally women dressed in loose black gowns arrived to cast their votes.

Wujoud Saleh, a 27-year-old housewife, said she was excited to be voting, but would not vote for a woman because she doubted they had the proper experience.

“I know the man and I don’t know the woman,” she said, speaking through a black veil. “I won’t vote for someone I don’t know.”

沙國女性參選地方議會選舉 首戰告捷20人當選

不少女性候選人透過社群宣傳政見，突破限制，贏得人心。

沙烏地阿拉伯12日舉辦首次開放女性投票及參選的沙國地方議會選舉，共有20名女性候選人當選，人數遠高於預期。部分選區的女性選民投票率高達八成，高於男性選民平均五成的投票率。

紅海港市吉達的女權人士莎哈兒．納塞夫說：「即使只有一名女性候選人當選，我們還是引以為傲。坦白說，我們原不預期會有任何女性候選人當選。」

美國國務院言人柯比13日發表聲明，稱讚沙國選舉開放女性參政，「創造歷史里程碑」。

大約6440名候選人參選284個地方議會的2106個席次，女性候選人超過900人。在參加此一具有分水嶺意義的選舉之前，女性候選人必須克服重重障礙，最後當選的比率不到全部席次的1%。

沙國市議會的職權僅限於地方事務，包括監督預算、對地方政府提供意見、道路與公園維護、垃圾清運等。沙國採絕對君主政體，對婦女的限制極為嚴格，包括禁止開車。在此之前，它也是舉世最後一個禁止女性參政的國家；投票期間，男女嚴格區別。

選戰期間，女性候選人不得與男性選民直接面對面，男女候選人也不得散發個人圖像。部分女性選民說，登記程序由於部分因素而受到阻礙，包括官僚體系刁難與缺少交通設施。這導致登記的女性選民不到全部的10%。

為了突破限制，許多女性候選人不約而同的透過社群媒體接觸選民並傳達訴求。

根據選委會的數據，年滿18歲的登記合格選民大約150萬人，其中包括大約11萬9000名女性選民，全國投票率則約僅47.4%，顯示這個絕對王權國家對民主選舉的程序仍然很陌生。不過在部分選區，女性選民的投票率高達80%，遠高於男性選民。沙國總人口將近2100萬。

作家瑪哈．阿吉爾表示：「女性候選人在幾個不同選區脫穎而出。這很棒。它顯示，以允許並支持女性從事公職而言，沙國社會已有相當的進展，未來還可能出現更多變化。」抵制選舉的選民則說，此次選舉只是點綴。

沙國已故國王阿布都拉4年前宣布，沙國將開放女性參與此次地方選舉。沙國男性2005年獲得投票權。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/world/middleeast/saudi-elections-are-first-to-include-women-as-voters-and-candidates.html

2015-12-14．聯合晚報．A3．話題．編譯陳世欽