KUWAIT CITY, 24 March 2004 — The narrow survival of Kuwait’s finance minister in a no-confidence vote in Parliament has highlighted once more the need for urgent political reform in the emirate to reinvigorate the Gulf’s first “democracy”, analysts here said yesterday.

In the first public questioning since Parliament was elected last July, Mahmud Al-Nuri was accused of wasting public money but managed Monday to secure ample support to retain his post.

The questioning and subsequent vote, which fell short by four of the 25 votes required to oust the minister, threatened to plunge Kuwait into a political crisis amid accusations that democratic principles had been breached.

MPs backing the grilling claimed the government had applied tremendous pressure on several lawmakers to support the minister while the government charged that opposition MPs had violated the constitution.

“Grillings and no-confidence votes are a healthy sign for our democracy. These are important tools for political accountability,” liberal activist and writer Ahmad Al-Dayeen said. “But the problem is in the government’s violation of the constitution and the principles of our democratic system ... It has achieved victory by applying pressure on MPs,” showing the vulnerability of Kuwait’s democracy, Dayeen said.

Prime Minister Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah, who was appointed to the post in July, has accused MPs of violating the constitution and said parts of the grilling would be referred to the Constitutional Court.

Nuri’s questioning was the 28th in the emirate’s 42-year-old constitutional democracy, half of which were conducted within the past 10 years, reflecting growing tension between the elected legislature and the government.

Following a political stalemate between government and Parliament in 1999, Emir Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah dissolved the legislative body and called for fresh polls the same year. The free-wheeling Parliament had been dissolved twice before, between 1976 and 1981, and 1986 and 1992.

As MPs threaten to question more ministers in the near future, a move set to further strain government-Parliament relations, the need for reforms is gaining support.

“It was acceptable in the past to say Kuwait is a democratic country. Now, it is difficult to say so ... A Kuwaiti Parliament without political, economic and social modernization will be more harmful than it is useful,” columnist Salah Al-Sayer wrote in the Al-Anbaa daily.

Since the ouster last April of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who in 1990 ordered his forces to invade and occupy Kuwait, the emirate has adopted a number of economic decisions in a bid to open its doors to foreign investors.

Although Kuwait was the first Gulf state to have an elected Parliament, key Cabinet posts including the premiership and the defense, interior, foreign affairs, oil and communications portfolios are held by members of the ruling Al-Sabah family.

Dayeen said no one in Kuwait objects to the ruling family staying in power, but wide-ranging political reforms are needed.

“We face a crisis because of the individualistic approach to governance, and because of attempts to drain the constitution of its democratic principles. The organized rotation of power is also absent,” he said.

“The solution lies in legalizing political parties and in rehabilitating the 1962 constitution,” on which democracy in Kuwait is based, Dayeen said.