Elections
On the morning of February 9, a large crowd gathered near the Mirpur-1 Eidgah field.
The air was filled with commotion and the festive rhythm of a band party. Rickshaws and cars came to a halt, and pedestrians stopped to watch.
Suddenly, an open-top vehicle emerged from the crowd. A woman stood inside, waving to people lining both sides of the road.
A five-year-old girl standing with her mother on the sidewalk waved back.
The mother, Swapna Akhtar, said their house was nearby. Her daughter insisted on coming out after hearing the band. When they arrived, they realised it was an election campaign procession for Sanjida Islam Tulee.
With an eye on attracting sectors considered decisive for the elections, President Lula has concluded that he needs to further calibrate his rhetoric and actions aimed at women in order to reverse disapproval of his administration among this electorate, which exceeds 40%.
The move comes as the Palácio do Planalto sees a kind of window of opportunity due to the absence, within the far-right camp, of a strong female leadership figure for the 2026 elections. Initially, one of the main bets in that field was former first lady Michelle Bolsonaro. However, her stepson Flávio Bolsonaro (Liberal Party, PL, São Paulo) emerged and was announced as a pre-candidate. Privately, the two disagree over the family’s electoral project for 2026, which, in the government’s view, weakens their presence on certain issues.
On women’s rights, the rift between them is even more evident. Michelle Bolsonaro heads PL Mulher, and on social media the women’s wing of the PL party has ignored Flávio’s pre-candidacy. Posts highlight Michelle and Jair Bolsonaro in particular, without reference to her stepson.
DHAKA – As the dust settles on Bangladesh’s 13th National Parliamentary Election, with the Election Commission (EC) declaring the 297 candidates elected to our parliament, a major source of disappointment remains: the systematic lack of women’s political participation. While a total of 85 women contested the polls last Thursday, including 66 with party nominations and 19 as independent candidates, only seven have been elected. Of the seven candidates, only one is independent; the rest are from BNP. Furthermore, as per pre-election stats from the EC, nearly a third of female candidates were relatives of influential men. Although in the ninth parliament, 21 women were directly elected, the total number of female contestants in this election was the highest on record. These numbers put the low participation of women politicians in perspective.
Myriad factors are cited by those who attempt to deny that a systemic exclusion of women persists in Bangladesh’s politics. But when a party announces outright that it will not include women in roles of leadership in a post-uprising Bangladesh, we must acknowledge the urgency of this problem.
Women played a crucial role in the ousting of the Awami League regime in 2024, yet hardly any female representatives were included in the July National Charter consensus discussions. When male politicians were subjected to enforced disappearance by Sheikh Hasina’s regime, it was the women in their families who led the fight for justice for years. The requirement by the Representation of the People Order, 1972, for political parties to reserve at least 33 percent of committee posts for women, including at the central level, was also not heeded by the major political parties in this election. Unsurprisingly, the recommendation by the Women’s Affairs Reform Commission to increase the number of reserved seats for women to 100 with direct elections was not accepted by political parties. Meanwhile, promises and sentiments about women’s empowerment by contesting politicians sound more like rote than out of a genuine wish to improve the persisting imbalance.
Examining the diversity of first-time candidates in last year’s federal election is a revealing exercise on many levels and serves as a sharper measure of distinct party efforts to recruit visible minority candidates.
By taking this analysis a step further and breaking down first-time visible minority candidates by gender, we find further evidence of a persistent gap in female candidates, whether visible minority or not.
Recent analyses have focused on women being nominated as sacrificial lamb candidates in unwinnable or swing ridings. Some exceptions have focused on visible minorities, either in the form of experimental polling or actual results.
The question we explored was whether visible minority women less likely to be nominated in competitive ridings. The data we found suggests that visible minority women confront compounded biases and discrimination in the political process thatmay work against them in favour of a more traditional view of the ideal politician.
As Bangladesh awaits the result of the 2026 national parliamentary election, one statistic should give us pause. Only 78 women are contesting the election — just under 4% of nearly 2,000 candidates. It is being described as a "record number".
Even in the 2024 national election, 128 women (4.71%) contested among 2,713 total candidates. In 2019, 22 women were elected to general seats. This backsliding says more about how political power is structured in Bangladesh than about women's political capacity.
Recently, at a day-long national conference titled Rupture, Reform, and Reimagining Democracy: Navigating the Agony of Transition, organised by the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD) at BRAC University to reflect on Bangladesh's political transition, a speaker jokingly asked: "Is Bangladesh ready for a male prime minister?"
A global wave of Gen Z-led protests have called for a fundamental restructuring of government and politics. Upcoming elections in Bangladesh and Nepal could offer young voters an opportunity for meaningful reform
Citizens in Bangladesh and Nepal head to the polls on February 12 and March 5, respectively, for the first general elections since youth-led uprisings toppled both countries’ governments. The two countries are seeking to rebuild their government institutions, but the elections could reflect the political headwinds in the region. Despite similar reform sentiments appearing in Japan and Thailand over the past few years, voters in those recent elections chose to back pro-establishment, conservative parties.
In August 2024, students in Bangladesh protested job quotas favoring those with ties to the previous political party in power, while in September 2025, protests against nepotism erupted in Nepal after social media posts by the children of political elites appeared to flaunt lavish lifestyles.
The two movements have had cascading effects. Since 2024, Bangladesh has been governed by an interim administration after protests led to the ouster of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who fled to India. In Nepal, parliament was set ablaze during the 2025 protests, prompting the resignation of Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli. Nepal’s so-called Gen Z protest helped spark a wave of youth-led movements under the banner of Generation Z—those born between 1997 and 2012.
Read More here.
In in the context of promoting democracy, equality and equal opportunities, UNDP partnered with the Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections (LADE) to develop a report on observing parliamentary elections from a gender perspective in order to promote women’s rights and political participation.
The report highlights the obstacles and gaps women face and provides details the social, cultural, political and economic obstacles and challenges that restrict their access to Parliament. The report assesses the participation of female voters, women candidates and political parties in the electoral process.
This activity is funded by the European Union, United States Agency for International Development, and German Cooperation.
Source: UNDP
The 2022 midterms have led to some new records for women candidates for the U.S. House, U.S. Senate, and governor in various race and ethnicity groups, according to an analysis of candidate filings from CAWP. Asian American/Pacific Islander, Black, Latina/Hispanic, and white women have all set new candidacy records this year, though not at all levels of office.
CAWP began collecting data on candidate race in 2004 using a system of self-identification for candidate race and ethnicity determination. Because this data relies primarily on candidate response to CAWP’s self-ID query and our queries occasionally go unanswered, there remain a small number of candidates for whom we were unable to determine racial identification. This is alluded to when we say “at least” preceding a reported figure below. Additionally, because candidates may, for various reasons, exit political races and no longer appear on ballots, these numbers can change slightly moving forward.
Beginning this year, CAWP no longer reports an aggregate number of “women of color” in our data collections on candidates and officeholders and instead provides disaggregated data for all women by race and ethnicity. This change was guided by our desire to move away from treatment of women as monolithic and challenge the centering of whiteness as a default racial/ethnic category. Of particular note here, because multiracial women are included in counts for each group with which they identify, adding the numbers below will not yield the total number of women of color running for various offices in this year’s midterms.
Click here to access the data.
On 26 September 2021, Germans elected the 20th Bundestag. This election was special in many ways. The article analyses the electoral campaign, voting behaviour, turnout, and the formation of a new coalition government by using a gender and intersectional lens. Against the conceptual background of descriptive, substantive, and symbolic representation, we outline the implications of the election for gender and intersectional politics in the new German Bundestag and the government. In descriptive and symbolic terms, we find higher numbers of women (and of minorities) in the Bundestag and its leadership as well as in government; in substantive terms, we observe the presence of ‘critical actors’ and the commitment to progressive politics in the new ‘Ampel’ coalition. Hence, we see at least a chance for change in several key policy areas and social progress in the next 4 years.
Click here to read the full article published by Sage Journals on 7 July 2022.
With more and more women running for office, races between women candidates will become the norm — not a novelty. Shared Hurdles reveals how candidates’ race, political party, and gender interact to influence voter opinion when more than one woman is on the ballot.
Research on gender dynamics in politics has seldom studied races between two women candidates. This research helps to fill that gap — and give women the tools they need to resonate with voters in races against other women. Shared Hurdles shows that in an election between two women candidates, gender biases are still prevalent, and voters hold both women to a higher standard than they hold male candidates. Shared Hurdles is a timely update on how gender shapes politics, and it provides a framework for women candidates who are campaigning against other women.
Click here to access the report.
Despite repeated warnings, Australia’s two major political parties continue to make one big mistake – and one MP has issued a scathing rebuke.
The women chosen by Australia’s two major political parties to run in the upcoming federal election are predominantly chosen for seats they are unlikely to win.
Shocking statistics gathered by news.com.au reveal a huge disparity in the chances of women entering parliament compared to their male counterparts, with men more likely to be chosen to run for a seat already held by their party.
Click here to read the full article published by News.com.au on 23 March 2022.
In December 2020, a leading Kenyan political party official, Edwin Sifuna, made vulgar remarks against a woman member of parliament. While campaigning for their political allies in a by-election, Sifuna said the woman is “not attractive enough to rape”.
In January this year, controversial bishop David Gakuyo, who is seeking election as a member of parliament, made demeaning remarks about two women politicians. He accused them of seeking votes while “swinging bare behinds”.
Sifuna and Gakuyo later made half-hearted apologies through the police after complaints were lodged about the language they used. The National Cohesion and Integration Commission, a government agency tasked with taming the excesses of politicians, was largely silent.
Click here to read the full article published by Daily Maverick on 17 March 2022.