Bahrainis to go to polls for second time next week
Bahraini people will go to the polls for a second time next week as the fate of only six out of forty seats of the country's parliament has been decided in the legislative election recently held in the Persian Gulf kingdom.
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A Bahraini Sunni woman casts her vote at a polling station in the city of Rifaa, south of the capital Manama, on November 22, 2014.
Bahrain’s official electoral commission said on Sunday that only six candidates, five Sunnis and one Shia, managed to secure seats at the parliament as a result of the vote, which was held despite widespread opposition on Saturday.
"Around 260 candidates will contest the remaining 34 seats on November 29," Bahrain’s Minister of Justice Khalid bin Ali Al Khalifa said.
Some 350,000 eligible Bahrainis had been called to choose 40 legislators from among 266 mostly Sunni candidates.
The turnout rate in the legislative election has triggered serious dispute between Bahrain’s Shia opposition and the Manama regime.
While the official electoral commission put voter turnout at 51.5 percent, Bahrain’s al-Wefaq National Islamic Society, which has decried the elections as a “farce”, said only 30 percent of eligible voters had participated in the election.
The opposition group denounced the official turnout rate as “amusing, ridiculous, (and) hardly credible.”
On Saturday, the polling stations closed at 10 pm local time (1900 GMT) after the electoral commission extended it for two hours in a likely bid to increase turnout amid reports that many Shia Muslims had joined a boycott campaign launched by the Bahraini opposition.
Al-Wefaq and four other opposition groups have called for an elected prime minister who is independent from the ruling Al Khalifa monarchy.
Since mid-February 2011, thousands of protesters have held numerous demonstrations in the streets of Bahrain, calling for the royal family to give up power.
