AL BIREH, West Bank — More than half the who participated in municipal elections on Saturday said they did so because they saw voting as a civic duty, twice the portion giving the next most popular reason.
AL BIREH, West Bank — More than half the who participated in municipal elections on Saturday said they did so because they saw voting as a civic duty, twice the portion giving the next most popular reason.
More than one-third said that jobs and economic conditions were their top concern, far more than any other single issue. And nearly two-fifths of voters were under 30, a much greater proportion than that age group’s share of the population.
Those results from an exit poll by the group the Arab World for Research and Development suggest that Palestinians are hungry for democracy and change after years of political stalemate, according to Nader Said, the sociologist who led the study. “I think the political message is that, still, there is a hope for the Palestinians to discourse,” Mr. Said said at a news conference here on Sunday.
The municipal elections, which were held Saturday after being postponed twice, were the first of any kind in the Palestinian territories in six years. Many here dismissed them as unimportant because Hamas, the militant Islamic faction that rules the , refused to take part or to conduct voting in the territory it controls. Neither was there any voting in East Jerusalem, or in about 250 West Bank cities and villages that failed to attract enough candidates for a contest.
But if those limitations made the elections less of a general political barometer and more of an internal referendum about President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah Party, which dominates the and the politics of the West Bank, the message from the voters was mixed.
Fatah candidates generally did well, but in 8 out of 16 major municipalities, the official lists of Fatah candidates were outpolled either by slates led by former Fatah members who were ousted from the party for daring to run independently, or by a mixture of other factions. (Half of the 820 voters who were surveyed by Mr. Said’s group at polling places in 19 cities and towns on Saturday identified themselves as Fatah supporters.)
“They have to really revisit their policies,” Ghada Zughayar, executive director of Aman, a coalition of civil society groups, said of Fatah. “They must give more confidence and more room for young leaders and moderate leaders among Fatah — moderate in the sense that they are accepting the real democracy, and they are accepting that there should be others to partner with Fatah, sharing the ruling of the country.”
Mr. Abbas and his allies, who were the targets of violent street protests last month over economic conditions, tried to portray the voting results as a victory, noting that many of the supposedly independent candidates who won were in fact Fatah loyalists. They also pointed out that local elections are inherently local, focused on municipal services and not on broad national questions, like how to deal with Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the deep rift between Fatah and Hamas.
“Eighty-five percent of those who won the elections are politically with us — they’re all for a two-state solution, for negotiations; they’re behind President Abu Mazen and the Palestinian leadership,” said Mohammad Shtayyeh, minister of the Palestinian economic council, using Mr. Abbas’s nickname. “It was an important step for us to inject new blood in the democratic system. It is important to revitalize the democratic structure itself.”
Jibril Rajoub, a member of Fatah’s central committee, said the “first victory” was that “elections were transparent, fair and democratic.”
But Basem Ezbidi, a political science professor at Bir Zeit University, described the vote as “almost comical,” and said he did not participate in part out of fear that it would “consolidate the division between Gaza and the West Bank.”
“Voting is absolutely an empty shell at this point,” Professor Ezbidi said. “I don’t think this event will move Palestinian politics. It will deepen the ills and the problems and the old stumbling issues.”
The major question now is whether the taste of local democracy that West Bank voters got on Saturday will increase the pressure on Palestinian leaders to schedule national parliamentary and presidential elections, which are long overdue, delayed by the Hamas-Fatah divide.
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