- Title: WEST BANK: West Bank vote held to help plug Palestinian democracy gap.
- Date: 20th October 2012
- Summary: RAMALLAH, WEST BANK (OCTOBER 20, 2012) (REUTERS) PEOPLE AT POLLING STATION SIGN READING IN ARABIC 'LOCAL ELECTIONS 2012' MEMBER OF PALESTINIAN ELECTIONS COMMITTEE CLOSING POLLING STATION WIDE OF CONFERENCE BY PALESTINIAN ELECTIONS COMMITTEE (SOUNDBITE) (Arabic) HEAD OF PALESTINIAN ELECTION COMMITTEE, HANA NASSER, SAYING: "At 19:00 (local time) we closed the polling statio
- Embargoed: 4th November 2012 12:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Gaza, West bank
- City:
- Country: Palestinian Territories
- Topics: Politics
- Reuters ID: LVA35ZBVRF2D7H2T4M8LBJS1J0YY
- Story Text: Palestinians voted in local elections in the Israel-occupied West Bank on Saturday (October 20), their first vote for six years and one with little choice, out of step with democratic revolutions elsewhere in the Arab world.
The results were expected to largely reaffirm the Western-backed, mainly secular Fatah party, which runs a de facto government in the slivers of land not policed by Israel, in the face of a boycott by its Islamist arch-rival, Hamas.
"At 19:00 (local time) we closed the polling stations. It started at seven in the morning till seven in the evening. All the people who were outside polling stations are people who voted," said the head of the Palestinian Election Committee, Hana Nasser, after polling stations were closed in West Bank cities.
Around 54.7 percent Palestinians from the West Bank voted in the election.
"The results are in general good. Around 277 thousand (Palestinians) voted from 550 thousand who were registered to vote," Nasser added.
While uprisings brought Arab governments from Morocco to Egypt to accommodate long suppressed Islamist parties, single party rule in the West Bank persists along with Fatah's feud with the more militant and anti-Israel Hamas, which has ruled the coastal Gaza Strip since the two groups clashed in 2007.
Hamas won a surprise majority in a parliamentary vote in 2006 - an outcome nullified by the civil war that followed a year later, decried the latest poll as "unilateral elections removed from a national consensus."
"Around 50 percent of the voters did not vote in the West Bank, which means that there are Palestinians who were boycotting the elections, this is a natural result of the separation, and because the Fatah faction want to jump forward to the next step, to gain political positions as long as it is facing political failure," said Hamas spokesperson, Sami Abu Zuhri, after primary results were out.
Fatah finally found time ripe for the repeatedly-delayed local elections. The party edged out Hamas in university ballots throughout the West Bank earlier this year and opinion polls show flagging support for the Islamist group since it began the uphill task of governing impoverished and crowded Gaza.
With Gaza not participating in Saturday's vote and a majority of West Bank residents living in areas where local councils are running uncontested, the election was less meaningful than in previous years.
Less than half of citizens surveyed by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research said they would vote, and an even smaller number thought the ballot would be fair.
Palestinians first held parliamentary elections in 1995, rare among Arab countries at the time and a positive step after the interim Oslo peace accords with Israel the previous year, which have long lapsed and become an albatross for the Palestinian leadership, including many of the same officials, which rules to the present day.
The Authority faces deepening challenges to its legitimacy. Dependency on foreign economic aid has opened up a financial crisis that exploded into street protests in cities up and down the West Bank last month.
But as economic problems worsen amid the standstill of Palestinians' broader political landscape, many hail the vote as an opportunity to renew institutions and focus on development at the grassroots level.
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