MANAMA, 27 October — Five months after the voters shunned all female candidates in the local elections, two Bahraini women have upset predictions of a similar drubbing in Thursday’s parliamentary elections, in which less than half the Parliament’s 40 seats were decided.
Lateefa Al-Guoud and Fawzia Ahmad Al-Ruwaie beat the odds and came out close to their male rivals, forcing next week’s run-offs in their constituencies along with 19 others where none of the candidates clinched 50 percent votes necessary for an outright victory.
Six other women candidates were knocked out of the race.
Bahraini voters gave the thumbs down to all 31 female candidates in municipal elections last May.
Guoud, 46, who won 1,204 votes in the first round, stands a good chance of beating her rival, a religious scholar.
If she comes out on top, Guoud, who heads the training department at the Finance and Economy Ministry and is running as an independent, would become the first woman elected to Parliament in any of the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states.
Guoud’s rival, Jassem Al-Saidi, was ahead by only 163 votes, which puts her in a much better position to eventually enter Parliament than Al-Ruwaie, the only other female candidate who made it to the second round.
Al-Ruwaie won 691 votes to her rival’s 1,266 in the northern constituency seven.
However, she is confident that she can win Thursday’s run-off against Yousif Zainalabedeen. “Though I represent the aspirations of Bahraini women, I am the candidate of everyone, men, women and the elderly,” she told the Gulf Daily News in remarks published yesterday.
Kuwait is the only GCC country with an elected Parliament, but women there are still barred from voting or running for office, and none of six female candidates managed to clinch a seat on a municipal council elected in Qatar in March 1999.
Two women have entered the Shoura Council of Oman via a restricted election system.
Islamists, chiefly from the Salafi current, were the biggest winners in the Bahraini elections, the country’s first since a Parliament elected in 1973 was dissolved two years later.
