2005 Afghan parliamentary election
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 Afghanistan portal |
Afghanistan held parliamentary and provincial council elections on 18 September 2005.
Approximately twelve million voters were eligible to vote for the 249-seat Wolesi Jirga, the lower house of parliament, and 34 provincial councils. The 2,707 parliament candidates (328 female, 2,379 male) are all independent; parties are not recognized by law and lists do not exist. This has been the subject of criticism: relatively unknown people could win a seat as easily as very popular candidates. It has also made it considerably difficult for the population to decide who to vote for, even though some candidates may be a member of or (financially) backed by a political party. Because a sizable percentage of the Afghan population is unable to read and write, all candidates had an icon as well. Those icons were included on the lists. These included, but were not limited to, pictures of footballs, cars or different sorts of flowers. Because there were not enough different icons, some candidates had multiple icons as their symbol: two or three footballs behind each other, like Gulallay Habib (page 16 of the Kabul parliament candidate list). For example, the candidate list for the Nurestan section of the parliament looks like this. Candidates were not able to chose the icons themselves: instead, the electoral committee chose them. Forty-five candidates were refused because of connections with armed groups or for not giving up their government jobs.
People vote for a candidate in their own province. Each province has a number of representatives in parliament, depending on the population. The largest province by population, Kabul, has 33 seats (390 candidates, 50 female, 340 male), whereas the small ones like Nurestan, Nimruz and Panjshir, have only two. The total number of provincial candidates is 3,025. Each province except Oruzgan had women running for seats in the provincial council. Female candidates are running for parliament in all districts.
These were the first elections in Afghanistan in 33 years: after communist rule, civil war and Taliban rule, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan toppled the Taliban regime and after the presidential elections in 2004, parliamentary elections were organized in 2005. Originally, according to the 2001 Bonn agreement, the elections were to be held in June 2004. However, due to the security situation, Hamid Karzai, then interim president (now president) of Afghanistan, moved the elections more than a year to the later date. Security is still an issue, as Taliban and others threatened to disrupt the elections violently. Several candidates were killed before polling.
A quarter of the seats - 68 seats - in the parliament are reserved for women, as well as 10 seats for the Kuchi community. Those are minimum numbers: there is no maximum for the number of seats for those groups.
The 102 members of the Meshrano Jirga, the upper house, are indirectly elected by the provincial councils.
Provisional results are expected 10 October, final results 22 October.
Sources and further reading
- Joint Electoral Management Body. A complete list of all candidates can be found here.
- Drei Frauen im afghanischen Wahlkampf, in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 15 september 2005
- Electionworld: elections in Afghanistan. Retrieved September 16, 2005.
- BBC Afghanistan election guide. Retrieved September 17, 2005.
- Candidate statistics. Retrieved September 17, 2005