Kuwaitis began heading to polling booths yesterday with little hope that their third election since 2006 will end a tussle between parliament and the government that has held up key economic reforms.
The new assembly will have to vote on a US$5 billion economic stimulus package seen as crucial to helping the financial sector of the Gulf Arab country overcome the global financial crisis.
The measures were approved by the caretaker Cabinet — which is dominated by members of the ruling family — and by ruler Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah in March after the last assembly was dissolved, but must also be approved by the new assembly.
There are no political parties in Kuwait, the world’s fourth largest oil exporter, but conservative Islamists and tribal figures who have opposed government economic plans and pressed ministers over accountability are expected to dominate again.
“Islamists can lose some seats but it won’t be enough to change the general mood in the parliament,” political analyst Shafiq al-Ghabra said.
Although its political system resembles Western democracy more closely than that of any other nation in the conservative Gulf Arab region, Kuwait has fallen behind its neighbors economically.
Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have all transformed themselves from desert backwaters into commercial, financial and tourist centers that attract foreign investors. By contrast, parliament has blocked many of Kuwait’s major projects and the state was forced to rescue a major bank last year.
Deputies accuse the government of corruption and oppose trimming back the huge welfare state. They have insisted on using their rights to demand ministers appear before parliament for public scrutiny.
The government, dominated by the ruling Al Sabah family, has balked at putting forward ministers to be questioned.
Kuwait’s protracted crisis led Moody’s Investors Service to say in March it may cut the country’s sovereign rating for the first time since it started rating Kuwait in 1996.
The government resigned in March to avoid Prime Minister Sheikh Nasser al-Mohammad al-Sabah, a nephew of the ruler, having to appear before the parliamentarians for questioning.
This prompted the ruler to dissolve parliament and call new elections in an effort to end the stalemate, as Kuwait’s rulers have done repeatedly during the 45-year history of the elected assembly.
Kuwaiti politics both repels and inspires fellow Gulf Arabs.
In no other Gulf state is the ruling dynasty’s power as diluted through popular participation in politics as it is in Kuwait. Other Gulf rulers looks askance at the experiment while some ordinary voters see the rowdy parliament as a bad example.
Kuwaiti women, who have never won a parliamentary seat, hoped voters fed up with repeated political crises will give female candidates a chance to prove themselves in yesterday’s poll.
Three women have been appointed ministers since Kuwait passed a 2005 law granting women the right to vote and run for office for the first time since parliament was created in 1963.
“This is our time. The right to vote was taken away from us for 40 years and until today we didn’t get all our rights,” Sara Akbar, chief executive of oil firm Kuwait Energy Co, told a women-only rally supporting female candidate Rola Dashti.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
RSS