Elections without
parties
Bush and Blair have hailed the
elections in Afghanistan as a great success, and
the media have joined in with their usual lack of scepticism. One rather large fact about the elections has
been underreported. It is that political
parties were effectively banned and candidates stood as independents. See, for example, the Boston Globe report,
Afghans go to polls in historic vote,
of 18 September 2005.
Around 5,800 candidates stood for
the 249-seat Wolesi Jirga
and 34 regional councils. Each candidate
had an individual logo, which was on the ballot paper, but party names were not
allowed on the ballot paper. (I haven’t
been able to find out whether party names were banned from election literature,
for example, from election posters).
The electoral system chosen was
single non-transferable vote, even
though the constituencies were multi-member.
In other words, an elector could vote for one candidate and that vote
could not be transferred to any other.
Presumably, in an n-member constituency, the n candidates with the most
votes got elected.
The US must have chosen this
system to protect their man in Kabul, President Hamid Karzai, as far as possible,
from party political pressure from the Wolesi Jirga.
In Iraq, where it was impossible
to organise the election of a single figure favourable to the US, the electoral system is
at the opposite end of the spectrum. It
is a party list system with a single Iraq-wide constituency, in which electors
vote for a party and individual candidates barely matter. The party chooses an ordered list of names,
and the number of them elected depends on the number of votes the party
receives. In the election on 30 January 2005, some of the names on these party
lists were even kept from the electors, allegedly because the individuals
concerned were too frightened to have their names published.
If adopted on a permanent basis, a
party list electoral system in a single Iraq-wide constituency will most likely
lead to a 3-party state – one Shia, one Sunni and one
Kurd.
David Morrison
Labour & Trade Union Review
31 October 2005