The Place of Women in Middle East Politics – The Perfect Candidate, Haifaa Al-Mansour, 2019

The movie is retracing Maryam’s story, a young doctor working in the only emergency department in a small rural area of Saudi Arabia. As one of the few doctors, she has difficulty legitimizing her status as a female doctor with her superior.

For months, she has been trying to get the driveway to the emergency department paved in order to work in better conditions and ensure a good reception for patients, without success: the administration constantly refuses to allocate the budget for the road works. 

While she wants to go to the medical conference in Dubai about the recruitment of doctors for the new department in Riyadh, once arrived at the airport, her travel permit is refused because it is no longer valid. As her father is on tour with the orchestra he plays in, she turns to Rachid, her mother’s cousin and the manager of the nominations for the local council. Because of the election period, he is only receiving candidates for the elections at the moment, so the only way for Maryam to talk to him is to apply for these elections. Thus, Maryam proceeds to apply to speak to Rachid, but he cannot help her with travel permits.

Her candidacy and her campaign are not taken seriously by either women and men. In a mocking and infantilizing tone, Maryam sees her candidacy as a subject of mockery when she defends it to the media and when she sensitizes women around her about the significance that she represents, both for them, and for the urban planning issues it defends.

A film that echoes the condition and accessibility of politics for women in the Middle East 

In the Middle East, the female participation rate is one of the lowest in the world.¹ In 2015, Saudi Arabia became the last country in the world to grant Saudi women the right to vote.

However, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the adoption of quotas by some Middle Eastern countries helped to increase the percentage of women’s participation in political decision-making from 10% to 18% between 2012 and 2017.

To influence mechanisms and actions for the political participation of women in the Middle East, the quota initiative has largely been undertaken by international organizations such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), or the World Bank. So far, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia are the two countries with the highest quotas for women’s inclusion in politics. For instance, the UAE has the highest proportion of  women in its national parliament, with a female presence of 50% thanks to these quotas. Since Saudi Arabia has limited the political participation of Saudi women in the Shura Council, they are therefore not allowed to hold ministerial and judicial positions. The Shura Council is a consultative assembly whose role is to submit proposals for laws to the King Salman bin Abdelaziz Al Saud and his cabinet responsible for the executive branch.  It operates on 14 levels, including social affairs, culture, finance, health and human rights. Conversely, the Middle East country with the lowest number of women in its parliament is Yemen, with 0.55%.²

However, the existence of these quotas does not guarantee equal distribution and participation of women in political instances, although this remains very important for the representation of women.There is a real disparity in the representation of women between elected and appointed chambers in bicameral parliaments (a parliament with two legislative chambers). Oman and Bahrain, the only two-chamber countries in the region, have very low rates of female participation, with 9% of the country’s judges judges being women.³

Yet, it is important to highlight an exponential growth in the presence of women in politics in the Middle East since the 20th century. In 2000, the participation of women in politics in the Middle East was 2.85%, 10.84% in 2010 and 17.59% in 2020.⁴

This increase was particularly visible during the Arab Spring, where women played a crucial role in revolutionary movements. However, despite this increased involvement, many women in politics still face serious violences : 80% of the women parliamentarians have been subject to one or more acts of physical, sexual and psychological violence and threats. Moreover, there has been a migration of this violence into the digital sphere, with 32% of cases of harassment and threats between 2010 and 2020.⁵

The political expression of Middle Eastern women in public space

While women are not very present in the political bodies of the Middle East, they are nevertheless present in political expression in the public space. As powerful agents of change in the public space, women are at the forefront of demonstrations to assert both their rights and those of the citizens of their countries.

In Iran, women have been leading the “Woman, Life, Freedom” revolutionary movement since 2022, following the murder of the young Mahsa Amini by the police for wearing a “veil that is not in accordance with the law”. Women are on the front line, but men and students from all social backgrounds are also taking to the streets to rise up against the Iranian government’s repression against human rights and women’s rights. However, women are a minority in Iranian politics, with 5.5% women parliamentarians in 2022, and 17 women in parliament out of a total of 290 parliamentarians today.

In Afghanistan, too, under the Taliban regime, women are rising up and rebelling against the prohibitions and deprivation of human rights for women and girls. According to the United Nations, 95 demonstrations were led by Afghan women between March and June 2023. In September 2021, the Taliban claimed that women would not be allowed to “work in high-ranking positions” within the government and they were “excluding” women from cabinet.⁶ In response, many organizations have been created with the aim of defending Afghan women and girls, such as the Afghan Women’s Council (AWC), which was established in 1990, and the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan (RAWA), which was established in 1977 in Pakistan.