At least 20 Saudi women emerged victorious in Saturday’s historic local elections, in which females in this religiously conservative kingdom were allowed to cast votes and run for office for the first time.
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The municipal council is the only government body in which Saudi citizens can elect their representatives.
Sadah said many female candidates used social media to campaign, but some others, including women’s rights activists, were disqualified from campaigning.
Riyadh, the Saudi capital saw the most women candidates win, at four.
It said that two-thirds of the seats in the kingdom’s 284 municipal councils were up for grabs in Saturday’s elections.
Yesterday, Saudis cast their ballots in municipal elections in which women were allowed to vote and stand as candidates for the first time in the country’s history.
More than 900 women ran for seats on municipal councils, Saudi Arabia’s only elected public chambers.
Sabq.org, a news website affiliated with the Saudi Arabia’s interior ministry, reported that a total of 17 women had been elected in various parts of the country.
Another woman won in Medina, where the Prophet Muhammad’s first mosque was built.
The previous two rounds of voting for the councils, in 2005 and 2011, were open to men only.
Around 7,000 candidates, among them 979 women, competed for 2,100 seats across the country.
What’s important, she adds, is to lift the restrictions on women’s lives in an absolute monarchy that limits politics for everyone.
At the end of the day, both man and womankind must take heed of the fact that has been disregarded in so many societies for so many years that, “When you educate a woman, you educate a nation…”
Getting to a polling station isn’t so simple for women as they can only drive to a polling station in the company of a man. Women were not allowed to display their photos, so all candidates were banned from using them during the election.
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Female voter turnout was almost 80 percent in places, compared with about 50 percent of registered male voters, according to an AFP analysis of official data. This development is an indication of a major breakthrough in the women rights movement in Saudi Arabia.
