When the polls open in Kuwait on Thursday, Kuwaiti women will be able to cast their votes for national candidates for the first time in the country's history. Registered women voters outnumber men by almost a third. It will also be the first time women have run for national office—28 of the 253 candidates for Parliament are women. NEWSWEEK's Zvika Krieger spoke by phone with Nathan Brown, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, about the implications of this election for the role of women in Kuwaiti society, the future of Kuwaiti politics and democratic reform in the region at large. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: What is the significance of women being allowed to vote in the upcoming elections?
Nathan Brown: It's been a long-standing debate in Kuwait about women's suffrage. It was to some extent the dividing line between the more liberal, secular parts of society and the more conservative, religious parts. But a lot of the debate over the women's vote was not so much focusing on women casting ballots and their right to have a voice but much more on the election itself. If women had the right to vote, then that implies they have to have some access to campaigners, have public assemblies, have people who canvas door to door who might ask to speak to women. These are the types of issues that Kuwaitis had raised.
Why are women achieving suffrage now? What has changed?
After 1990, and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, much of the Kuwaiti ruling family swung behind the idea because it was a little of an international embarrassment. They felt that Kuwait was dependent on international support for security, and it was hard to explain why Kuwait was one of the last holdouts in not allowing women to vote. A lot of countries that were supporting Kuwait, especially the U.S., were asking questions about it. The Kuwait Parliament voted on it several times, there were several court cases, and every single time the effort to bring women the vote lost at the last minute—a few votes short in Parliament, the cases were dismissed on technical grounds, and so on. This time, the supporters finally got the majority vote, the ruling family swung heavily enough behind it, and the opposition of the Islamists, though strong, has probably decreased over recent years. It is not so much an Islamic issue, so it doesn't so much matter to the leadership.
Have the Kuwaitis been influenced by the so-called Arab Spring for Democracy that has been spreading across the region in recent months?
In some ways, yes. Plenty of Arab governments have been looking for painless ways to get on the right side of the reform issue internationally. And that may explain the growing enthusiasm of the Kuwaiti government for the idea.
Nathan Brown
What are some of the challenges that female candidates in particular face in this election?
I think a women running in a heavily religious constituency would come into problems because of the conservative nature of the voters. It's not just a matter of convincing women to vote for them but even in getting access to voters. For instance, public gatherings are traditionally male only, or more recently, sex segregated. So if any women candidates were to win, I would say it would be in the liberal or secular constituencies of society. There are also no women that have run a political campaign before. Kuwait has regular parliamentary elections, and plenty of incumbents win. And there are simply no women incumbents. There has been some effort internationally, with some support and training of women candidates, but it not clear how much effect that will have.
Does the attainment of women's suffrage reflect larger trends in the role of women in Kuwait society?
I wouldn't say so. Kuwait has always been a little bit odd this way. Some elements of society are gravitating toward the conservative end of the spectrum, looking like the most conservative parts of Saudi Arabia, and other parts are looking like some of the more secular parts of the Arab world, like Beirut. So while I'm not sure this represents a really big shift in that way, it does represent a triumph on this major issue [by] women's-rights advocates.
In the last election, liberal and reformist candidates faired relatively poorly, dropping from 14 to three seats. Will the participation of women reverse this trend?
No, I don't think so. We don't have great indications of voting results, but to the extent that we do, women will vote similarly to men, and on some issues, might be even more conservative than men. Kuwait has really small electoral districts, which means that politics is really retail in Kuwait. So a lot of the issues will be neighborhood issues—who sticks up best for this neighborhood—and will not necessarily be connected with big broad political and social issues. There is very often an assumption [in the United States] that women are an oppressed group in Arab societies specifically and in Muslim societies in general, and that if you liberate them they will be voices for liberalism and reform. Yes, there are certainly women who are, but for the most part, women's social and political beliefs are not that much different from men's. They are very much part of the same society, reflecting the prevailing ideas of that society.
Does the Kuwaiti Parliament have the power to effect change? Or is it a puppet legislature like many other parliaments in the region?
The Kuwait Parliament has always stood out in the region. Members of the ruling family do not run for Parliament. There aren't any real parties and thus no governing parties that dominate the Parliament, like what happens in Egypt and Tunisia. And what that means is that in Kuwait, there is a Parliament that is a little bit feistier, a little bit more independent, that debates issues with a little more openness, that has a very strong sense of its own prerogatives and defends them. So in this sense, it's a very active and lively Parliament. Where it has always fallen down is on follow-through. It's often badly divided, inefficient, sidelined into symbolic issues, polarized between Islamists and liberals and this sort of thing. So it's a Parliament that attracts a tremendous amount of attention. It is a really vital and import public forum, but it is not clear that it is an important decision-making body.
What are some of the major issues of this election?
This election specifically was called because of a confrontation between the government and the Parliament over the electoral law. Essentially right now you have Kuwait divided up into very small districts, which makes politics operate on a retail level, so reformers in the Parliament wanted to reform the law to have larger districts. It sounds like a small, technical change, but they thought that this would really convert the political system so that candidates would have to run on ideology and platforms and perhaps even lead to the formation of political parties. That would really change the flavor of Kuwaiti politics. Instead of appealing to your neighbors, you would have to cater to broad-base constituencies.
The liberals swung behind that because they had been frustrated for years, even decades, by the government's ability to divide and rule the members of the Parliament, and the Islamists swung behind it because they thought they had the strongest platform and could possibly be the strongest political party. You had this liberal-Islamist coalition that was pushing the government harder than it wanted to be pushed. So now this coalition is trying to make that the central issue of this election.
The coalition had gotten enough people in Parliament that they could basically threaten to bring the government down. And they brought a motion to formally question the prime minister, a leading member of the ruling family, and that is the farthest that any Kuwaiti Parliament had dared to go in challenging the government. They really embarked on this full-on confrontation with the government, and the government said, "We can't work with them, we're going to have to elect a new one." And it is quite possible that the new one, this reform coalition is hoping, will have enough votes to force this issue on the government again.
The issues they are raising are perennial issues in the Kuwaiti Parliament, debated over and over, and the government usually finds a way to fend off pressure for change. While the opposition wants to make this a big, definitive election on reform issues, the government has shown in the past that it is very adept at parrying reform pressures. Also, secularists and Islamists are very suspicious of each other on virtually every other issue, so the coalition might fall apart. But if they manage to win a victory in this election and force through an electoral reform, they will really change the nature of Kuwait politics.
What would these reforms mean for the Arabian Gulf?
There has been a trend in the past 10 to 15 years toward writing down constitutions, electing assemblies, those sort of things. And those countries tend to watch what's going on in Kuwait fairly closely. Kuwaitis take some pride in acting as a democratic leader in the gulf. "What happens in Kuwait today will happen in Qatar in 10 years," is sometimes how Kuwaitis talk. I don't know if it will follow automatically, but there is definitely some Kuwaiti influence by example in the region.