Women Prominent in Coming Elections

The women candidates running in the next elections have stolen the spotlight by attracting the attention of voters with their modern looks, which the public was not used to in the parliament. They have also drawn attention through their remarkable social and cultural presence, especially the women working in literature and media.

This does not apply to all women candidates, for some previously known faces are trying hard to return to the parliament by adopting a discourse that criticizes parliamentary and governmental performance. They have also split from their former parliamentary political blocs and rejoined the blocs that were more likely to win in the current electoral race.

A few new women candidates have been spruced up to show their charm, becoming objects of mockery for many social media users, who described them as apparently participating in a beauty contest rather than political elections.

However, this does not mean that there is an electoral culture that has emerged from the democracy of the past 11 years: Next to the posters of liberal female candidates there are posters of other candidates. These posters show the name of the candidate and her coalition, but instead of showing her picture, they show that of her husband, brother or father. These promotion posters are captioned with a sentence that explains the relationship between the man in the picture and the candidate.

Add to this the images of veiled female candidates, who appear as only a black mass in the posters. This reflects the depth of the social crisis plaguing the Iraqi conscience as a result of the religious fatwas and obsolete social norms.

If we put this social crisis and electoral whims aside, we find that there is coherence between the yearning for a civil state — this yearning is prevalent in cultural dialogues and among the youth elites that are fed up with the harbingers of dictatorship after the failure of Islamic parties to manage the country — and the yearning for the rise of women to the parliament, as one of the aspects of the civil state.