Political Parties
Preventing Violence Against Women in Politics – Benchmarks for Political Parties (2022) is a joint paper by democracy organisations working with political parties, which presents interventions for political parties on how to prevent and address any form of violence against women in politics (VAWIP) in order to strengthen women’s participation and representation in politics and political decision-making.
The paper is produced by Demo Finland, International IDEA, The Oslo Center and The National Democratic Institute (NDI) as part of the Political Party Peer Network (PPPeer).
Click here to access the report.
A secret review into the Liberals’ disastrous election loss in May has ruled out formal quotas for the number of women MPs in federal parliament and instead recommends a British-style recruitment drive to improve the party’s gender balance.
Former party director Brian Loughnane and Liberal Party finance spokeswoman Jane Hume have been leading the review, which began soon after the last federal election, and the pair briefed the federal executive on the almost-finalised review on Monday.
Click here to read the full article published by The Sydney Morning Herald on 30 November 2022.
Monika Zajkova was elected as the new party leader of LDP, ALDE Party member party in North Macedonia, at the party’s 8th National Congress held under the slogan "United, brave, loud!" on Sunday 20 November in Skopje.
Zajkova, a member of the North Macedonia's Parliament since 2020 was elected with 374 votes in favour and one against to the position for the next four years, assuming the role from Goran Milevski. Zajkova becomes the youngest party president in North Macedonia at the age of 31 and the first woman to lead LDP.
"I promise you future-oriented leadership,” she said in her acceptance speech to Congress, “because I see the LDP as a party that builds policies in the present, which will ensure a future where we will live better than today. The place where our generations will live to whom we bear the responsibility to take action today, right now!”
Click here to read the full article published by ALDE Party on 23 November 2022.
Xi has revealed an all male politburo for the first time since 1997. The move erases one of the few steps women had made towards real power in Communist China
Across seven decades of turmoil and change, one thing about China’s leadership has remained unchanged. It is all-male.
Men led China into the famine of the Great Leap Forward, through the convulsions of the Cultural Revolution and during the economic opening of the 1980s and 90s. In Xi Jinping’s “new era” of digital authoritarianism, men remain in charge of the country.
The Communist party has run China for 70 years, and in that time no woman has ever been a member of China’s Politburo Standing Committee, the small group that runs the country, much less led the party or been made president or premier.
Click here to read the full article published by The Guardian on 23 October 2022.
Introduction
Women politicians and political aspirants in Sri Lanka share certain patterns of marginalisation within patriarchal party and political structures which prevent them from entering and engaging in agentive politics. Women encounter barriers to party nominations and access to campaign finance when contesting and, if elected, freedom to address councils and submit proposals without being harassed. They also face challenges in access to infrastructure to carry out their political mandates. These barriers are framed by cultural and religious ideals about gender, sexuality, and the family that shape the national consciousness (Steans 2007) as well as entrenched patriarchal standards about political engagement and what it means to be a political leader.
Given these shared challenges, in this article, we ask whether the quota for women in local government can foster solidarity among women within parties and across party lines to address gender discrimination and increase women’s representation and participation beyond local politics. Or is the idea of solidarity among women politicians to further their shared interests far removed from the reality of their concerns? What would solidarity among women politicians at local level look like and (how) can this result in positive results for other women in politics and women in general? We attempt to unpack uniting and dividing factors through analysis of women’s wings in political parties.
Click here to read the full article published by Social Scientists’ Association Lanka.
Italy recently joined Great Britain, Finland and New Zealand after the country elected its first woman prime minister.
Globally, women in office have often been the most underrepresented when it comes to politics, and in the Pacific, it is even more so.
Statistics from United Nations Women for Asia and the Pacific show that the region has the lowest levels of women’s representation in national office, a mere 7.3 per cent recorded as of 2018.
In Fiji, the onset of the 2022 elections provides an opportunity for women to step up and make their mark on the political scene, however, there are a few challenges in achieving this.
Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre (FWCC) coordinator Shamima Ali said women’s non-participation was historical and represented the inequalities and oppression of women.
Click here to read the full article published by The Fiji Times on 18 October 2022.