Does Iraqi politics value women candidates?

By Ella Rolfe

International Women’s Day, following hot on the heels of the most important Iraqi election in five years, is not likely to get much attention here. But questions of women’s role in rebuilding Iraq feature high on both domestic and international agendas, and female election candidates have been touted as central to the process. In this election, even the Islamic parties have female candidates. So are they taken seriously?

The answer seems to be a disappointing ‘occasionally’. All parties are required to elect a quota of 25% women (although it’s not clear whether this will be enforced), so there will be candidates. But their competence and voter appeal are very often low, and many of them are unlikely to get much of the vote.

The quota and the paucity of women prepared – or free enough from social restrictions – to stand forces some parties to scramble to find female candidates. This means that many are unqualified; and they often fall down when challenged on policy issues.

Chicago’s DePaul University recently organised a debate for women candidates in the Kurdish city of Sulimaniyah. According to a friend who was there, the only candidate who got any applause – or indeed said anything worth hearing – was Bushra Al-Ubaidi, a Baghdad candidate for the Unity Alliance of Iraq. The fact that Al-Ubaidi was the most popular despite being the only Arab in the room underlined the failure of the other candidates to capture their audience. She is one of the few who are experienced, knowledgeable and confident enough to form and present opinions on the issues.

Because of this, woman candidates often lack respect. There is a joke going round Baghdad about one female candidate who appears in a niqab on her campaign posters, with only her eyes visible. How do we know, people say, if there is a Ms or a Mr under the veil?

Ala Talabani, one of Iraq’s most prominent woman politicians, feels there has been a small change in society towards credibility for women candidates. But, she says, given a choice both men and women will still go for the male candidate. If women voted for women, equality in Iraq’s parliament would be guaranteed; but, she told me, even the competent female candidate “will never get the vote she deserves.”

Parties are also guilty of undervaluing and under-investing in female candidates. In Kirkuk, Talabani tells me that men can be seen moving around much more than women on the campaign trail. While this could be due to social restrictions and security risks in the contested city, Talabani thinks it is partly due to a lack of support teams provided to women candidates. In Baghdad, a recent newspaper report exposed the expectations placed on women candidates: academic Fawziah Al-Jaberi said that she refused to stand because the party “asked me to sign a pledge to implement exactly their directions and orders if I won.” To Al-Jaberi, becoming a candidate under such restrictions would be “selling my attitude and personality” so she decided to keep out of the whole business.

Whatever the causal relationship between a lack of respect for women, the quota, and the low standard of many female candidates, women do have one very strong advantage. Especially in minority parties with only a few seats to fill and only one or two female candidates, the quota means that any woman who does stand is almost guaranteed to be elected.

Even a woman who gets hardly any votes stands a good chance. Iraq follows a complicated system of redistributing excess votes from the first 200 or so victorious candidates among other candidates, to fill the remaining 125-odd seats. This ‘overhead’ system is ostensibly meant to allow minority candidates a chance; but minority parties could also use it to fill their quotas, redistributing votes from a successful seat to secure victory for a woman in a seat where they have a female candidate.

The effect of the quota is therefore to virtually guarantee that while a proportion of Iraq’s MPs are female, not all of them will be well-qualified. In some cases it does get strong, competent women into parliament, but these cases are few. Under these circumstances, it is perhaps hardly surprising that neither Iraqi politics nor Iraqi voters much value female candidates.’