When can woman win elections?

Yemen’s first governors elections are due on May 17, 2008. A poll released last week uncovered that 78 percent of the voters see that the governors elections are of great significance for Yemen to enlarge public participation, enhance democracy, and is a great transaction to the decentralization system and local authority system.

However the poll uncovered that 23 percent of the voters believe the governors elections were not important because the elections aim at beautifying the image of the state and that only the candidates that the state wants to win will win the elections.

Some of the opposition parties, namely the Joint Meeting Party (JMP), called for boycotting the elections because they demanded the governors should be elected directly by the public not by the members of the local councils who won the elections in 2006.

These opposition parties boycotted the elections because they knew in advance that they cannot win because they do not have a majority in the bodies of the local councils of all governorates.

Also, the poll uncovered that 52 percent of the voters reject nominating or electing a woman for the post of the mayor or a governor. This is real catastrophe, particularly when realizing that the voters took part in the poll were all university graduates, including MA and Phd degree holders.

If this was the vision of the most educated people of Yemen about woman, what would be the vision of the ordinary citizens and the illiterate, who are the majority?

The organizers of the poll unfortunately were unfair and discriminative as their poll covered only 20 percent female voters compared to 80 percent male voters. 

This confirms that woman can never be a member of the parliament, a governor or a president through ordinary elections and that the quota system is the only solution for insuring woman participating in decision making until the public knows well the capacities and abilities of woman in different aspects of life.

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