Ramallah, April 4 : As the May 22 Palestinian legislative elections are fast approaching, the multiplicity of the candidacy has heralded a potential scattering of ballots and divisions in the voters’ attitudes since most of the minor independent lists of candidates are not expected to cross the threshold for a seat, according to analysts.
Last week, the Palestinian Central Elections Commission (PCEC) announced that 36 electoral lists have registered for the upcoming legislative elections, and all of them will be published with the names and slogans of their candidates on April 6, Xinhua news agency reported.
The number of the lists of candidates for the 2021 elections is three times more than that in the last legislative elections in 2006, in which 11 lists competed and six of them managed to cross the electoral threshold.
In January, President Mahmoud Abbas had announced that the 2021 general elections will comprise the legislative elections on May 22, the presidential elections on July 31, and the elections of the Palestinian National Council, the highest decision-making body of the Palestine Liberation Organization, on August 31.
With as many as 36 lists running for the parliamentary election, this “candidacy in chaos” explains “how eager the Palestinians are for the polls after 15 years of postponement”, Abdulmajid Sweilem, a political analyst from the West Bank city of Ramallah, told Xinhua on Saturday.
“The upcoming elections are very important because it is a decisive and fateful battle that decides the future of the Palestinian political system and of the entire national cause,” he said.
Explaining the multiplicity of candidacy, Sweilem cited President Abbas’ Fatah party, which submitted three lists of candidates: one is official while two others are led by former Fatah leaders who were fired by Abbas from the party’s central committee.
“This division will certainly weaken the official list of the ruling Fatah party in the new legislative council, and may pave the road for the Hamas to rule the Palestinian Authority,” the analyst warned.
While many of the candidates uphold political pluralism, many others may react negatively, thereby leading to a potential scattering of the votes, “especially when the less influential lists surprisingly gain more votes than expected”, Mkhaimar Abusada, an associate professor of political science at al-Azhar University in Gaza, told Xinhua.
“Most of the electoral lists are independent and not affiliated with any of the political factions, so the potential scattering of the votes will weaken their chances of exerting a real impact and ultimately the power of the elected Legislative Council … as the odds are that no party will be given the necessary majority,” Abusada explained.
Left-wing parties have failed to run under one unified list, while the right-wing Hamas, which rules Gaza de facto, runs under one unified list which includes leaders of the Islamic movement in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
As the analysts have pointed out, most of the small independent lists will not even reach the electoral threshold of 1.5 per cent votes given their dispersion and the political polarization in the Palestinian territories
Rajab Abu Sereyah, a political analyst from Ramallah, told Xinhua that the system of full proportional representation adopted in the legislative elections “will weaken the chances of most of the lists to reach the electoral threshold.”
If calculated on the basis of the 77.69-percent turnout of voters in the last legislative elections held in Palestine in 2006, one seat in the elected Legislative Council should equate to 20,000 to 30,000 votes
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