RIYADH, 30 January 2005 — Government servants, retirees, university professors, businessmen, a doctor, a journalist and university students are among the 698 candidates who are seeking seven municipal seats in the elections in Riyadh. The campaign began yesterday with the total number of registered voters in the Riyadh region 150,000 of which 80,000 are in the city itself. A total of 598 municipal seats will be filled on 178 municipal councils in the Kingdom’s 13 regions. Fifty percent of the seats will be filled by government nominees and fifty percent will be elected.
Sultan Al-Bazie, spokesman of the Central Election Committee at the Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs, explained that there was no ceiling on campaign expenditure. He noted, however, that “they will have to give a statement of their expenditure.”
He pointed out that so long as they can prove that they used their own funds for campaigning, there was no limit on expenditure. Candidates are allowed to advertise in newspapers but not on TV or radio. They can conduct door-to-door campaigns, hold meetings in hotels or designated public places with the permission of the election committees in each of the region’s municipalities.
Al-Bazie said: “Since this is a new experience for us, we’ll see if any regulation or bylaw needs to be modified for future elections.”
Asked if expatriates could present their grievances to candidates from their constituencies, Al-Bazie said they could. He said the elections would be monitored by Saudis only although at the beginning, they had technical cooperation with the UN (for writing the bylaws) and with GTZ, a German federal agency that collaborates on technical issues with various government agencies in the Kingdom.
He said 128 candidates were disqualified from contesting the elections. To be eligible, a candidate should be literate, have no criminal record and not related to anyone from the municipalities in the region. He should be a resident of Riyadh for at least 12 months.
Referring to arrangements for the first phase of the elections, Al-Bazie said 73 polling stations had been set up in Riyadh out of a total of 142 for the Riyadh region as a whole. Middle-aged and senior citizens have shown greater enthusiasm in exercising their right than the younger generation has. He said that since the candidates were contesting the elections on their own individual platforms, the themes of their campaigns were drawn largely from issues of civic concern — solving traffic problems, setting up youth centers and environmental protection. He added that appeals to tribal loyalties were strictly prohibited.
