A record number of 330 candidates, including 73 women, contested the 40 seats in the lower house of parliament, which advises King Hamad bin Issa al-Khalifa, in power since his father’s death in 1999.
The absence of representatives of the two main opposition groups, Al-Wefaq (Shiite) and Waad (secular), banned by the government in 2016 and 2017, however, sparked calls for a boycott.
“These elections will bring no change,” Ali Abdulemam, a Bahraini human rights activist based in the UK, told AFP. “Without opposition we will not have a healthy country,” he added.
Polling stations opened at 8 a.m. (5 a.m. GMT) for the nearly 350,000 registered voters and closed around 8 p.m. (5 p.m. GMT).
The websites of Parliament and the official news agency were victims of a hacking operation on Friday, but were restored on Saturday, as well as the official election website, which was inaccessible until 9:30 a.m. (0630 GMT).
The Home Office slammed Twitter for action to “obstruct the election and circulate negative messages in desperate attempts” to discourage voters from voting.
A key ally of the United States in the region, Bahrain was rocked by unrest in 2011, when security forces suppressed protests led in particular by Shiite parties demanding a constitutional monarchy. The ruling family comes from the Sunni community.
Since then, many dissidents have been imprisoned and hundreds have been stripped of their nationality.
The ballot was organized in an “environment of political repression”, denounced Amnesty International. “Today in Bahrain there is no real political opposition,” said Amna Guellali, deputy regional director of the NGO.
The kingdom of just 1.4 million people says it tolerates “no discrimination, persecution or division based on ethnicity, culture or creed”.
Manama, home to the US Fifth Fleet, with around 7,800 troops deployed in the country, and a British base, regularly accuses Shiite Iran of being behind unrest in the kingdom, which Tehran denies.
– Political isolation –
In 2018, the country passed so-called political and civil isolation laws banning former members of opposition parties not only from running for parliament, but also from sitting on the boards of civil organisations.
Since then, between 6,000 and 11,000 citizens have been targeted by these laws, retroactively, estimated the NGO Human Rights Watch in a report published in October.
For the human rights organization, these elections “offer little hope of fairer results than in 2018”.
The ballot comes a few days after a visit by Pope Francis, devoted to interreligious dialogue, his second to a Gulf country after the United Arab Emirates in 2019.
Without pointing the finger at certain countries, the sovereign pontiff insisted during his visit on the respect of human rights, affirming that it was essential that they are “not violated but promoted”.
Bahrain is an archipelago made up of a large island and 34 other smaller ones, located between Saudi Arabia and Iran. With an area of just 700 square kilometers, the smallest country in the Middle East, which normalized relations with Israel in 2020, is a strategic ally of the West.
Heavily dependent on oil, the country benefited in 2018 from an aid plan of 10 billion dollars (8.6 billion euros) from its main Gulf allies.
