Daily Star - Where Are The Women In Local Elections

By Dalila Mahdawi Daily Star staff

BEIRUT: With the municipal elections less than two weeks away, candidates are working around the clock to try and win over their constituents. On walls across town, posters showing the faces of different candidates jostle for space. Conspicuously missing from these posters, however, are women. Aware of the fact that very few women are putting themselves forward for municipal seats, the National Commission for Lebanese Women (NCLW) has been organizing symposiums in each district to encourage wider participation. Although the deadline for candidacy in Mount Lebanon passed on Wednesday, there is still time for women to put themselves forward elsewhere in the country. On Friday, the NCLW and the Lebanese American University’s Institute for Women’s Studies in the Arab World (IWSAW) held a symposium in Beirut explaining how women could run in the elections and detailing women’s experiences in municipal councils. “Women should not wait for opportunities to come to them. Rather, women should [seek out] the opportunities,” said Anita Nassar, the assistant director of the IWSAW. NCLW, in collaboration with the Ministry of Social Affairs, has also launched a media campaign encouraging women to run in the elections and to vote. The goal of the campaign, NCLW Secretary General Fady Karam told The Daily Star, is to get the Lebanese “used to seeing women participate.” He said the absence of women from politics came at the expense of Lebanese society as a whole. Women “should be more involved in politics because she is part of society. A society cannot just be developed by men.” Although Lebanese women hold senior positions in the private sector, such positions in political life continue to elude them. Since Lebanese women were granted suffrage in 1953, there have never been more than six women parliamentarians at the same time. Lebanon’s general elections last June were widely considered the most democratic and competitive in years. But out of a total of 587 candidates, only 12 were women, a figure that represents a mere 2 percent. Only four of those 12 – Bahia Hariri, Gilberte Zouein, Nayla Tueni and Strida Geagea –were elected to Lebanon’s 128-member Parliament, with all coming from political families. Only two women, Raya Haffar Hassan and Mona Ofeish, were selected for Cabinet posts. Interior Minister Ziyad Baroud, who has championed women rights in Parliament, said on Thursday he was disappointed by the lack of women who had stepped forward as candidates in Mount Lebanon. Out of 10,138 candidates, only 570 are women. “This is unfortunate and confirms the need to adopt the [30 percent] quota,” he said, referring to a reform he tried to introduce for the elections. A February survey by The International Foundation for Electoral Systems and the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that women had a “slightly higher voter turnout” than men in the elections, with 80 percent saying they voted, compared with 78 percent of men. The results confirm those of a January study by the Lebanese Council of Women, which found that slightly more women than men had gone to the ballot box. The study also showed that despite this numerical advantage, women did not support women candidates, with more than two-thirds saying they had not voted for any. “It’s very sad to see there are not enough women participating, not only in the municipalities but in all things,” said Roula Ajouz, the first and only woman on the Beirut City Council. Women remain a minority in Lebanon’s political life but they should not allow fear to dissuade them from public service, Ajouz said. “I don’t just represent women, I represent both [genders]. I represent Lebanon and I represent a cause,” she said.