Elections

DOHA: Two women won seats on Qatar’s 29-member municipal council, the Gulf emirate’s sole elected body, the elections committee said on Wednesday. Sheikha al-Jafiri and Fatima al-Kuwari retained the seats they had won in 2015.

Five women were among the 85 candidates standing in Tuesday’s election for the emirate-wide council. The other three failed to win seats. 

The main issues driving Finland’s 2019 parliamentary election on April 14, 2019 included the previous government coalition’s unsuccessful attempt to pass a long-debated social and healthcare reform; the need for action to mitigate climate change; and immigration policies. A new Parliament is elected every four years.

From her home in Jakarta, Permaswari Wardani proudly holds up an intricate hand-drawn comic.

It’s her humorous take on what she sees as the wrongs in Indonesian politics today.

The 38-year-old architect hopes the run of 5,000 copies – leading to donations – will help propel her to an upper house seat in her country’s parliament, within the week.

The 2020 presidential election marks the first time more than two women have competed in the Democratic or Republican primaries, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. Democratic congresswomen Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Kamala Harris of California, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts have all thrown their hats in the ring. And Marianne Williamson, a bestselling author and a spiritual counselor to Oprah, is also running.

CHICAGO — Lori Lightfoot has made history on several fronts after winning Chicago’s mayoral runoff on Tuesday.

She will become the city’s first black woman and its first openly gay person to hold the office when sworn in next month. The nation’s three largest cities have never elected a black woman as mayor — the other two, New York and Los Angeles, have never even had a female mayor — and none of the three cities has ever elected an openly gay person to the job.

The Maltese state will fund political parties to recruit, promote and train female candidates as part of a plan launched by Prime Minister Joseph Muscat unveiled.

“Legal amendments are being proposed for the Financing of Political Parties Act to open the way for state funds that can be used to recruit, promote and train candidates pertaining to the under-represented sex,” the policy document reads.

When Slovakia's newly elected President Zuzana Caputova -- the country's first ever female head of state -- delivered her acceptance speech on Saturday she immediately set herself apart from the wave of populist parties sweeping Europe.

The 45-year-old liberal lawyer thanked voters not just in Slovak -- but in Hungarian, Czech, Roma and Ruthenian -- in a show of unity with the nation's minority groups and rejection of the nationalist rhetoric popular in some neighboring countries.

Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik on Sunday announced 33 per cent quota for women in the allocation of Lok Sabha tickets of Biju Janata Dal (BJD) party.

A non-partisan collective is targeting the general elections for equal representation of women in Parliament, but the road to gender-just politics is tricky to traverse