Elections test Spain's new gender-parity law
Sunday's elections are expected to bring 7,000 women into local and regional offices, where they currently hold less than a third of the seats.
from the May 25, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
French political parties, which fill allotted parliamentary seats beginning with those at the top of party lists, have gotten around the law by putting women at the bottom of their lists. Or they simply accept the financial consequences of noncompliance.
In 2002, the Union for the Popular Movement (UMP), the party run by newly elected President Nicolas Sarkozy, gave up ¤4.2 million ($5.6 million) in state funding rather than run an equal number of female candidates for parliamentary elections.
Only 20 percent of its candidates were women. The Socialist Party gave up ¤1.6 million with 36 percent women.
But ahead of parliamentary elections in June, there is some improvement. Nearly 48 percent of the Socialist candidates and 30 percent of UMP candidates are women.
"It's not an easy task because we have more than 350 incumbent candidates," Alain Marleix, UMP's election director, told Le Monde newspaper. "But we have made a place for women, and we … have reserved for them 'winnable' districts" – a departure from the past when women were often put on lists in constituencies where they had no chance of winning.
In Finland, parity initially encountered the same problem. "Many municipalities didn't want to implement the law," says Anne Maria Holli, a political scientist at the University of Helsinki. "But then they noticed another law already on the books that allows any citizen to file a complaint about the unlawful composition of public entities. That made the new law effective."
More important, says Ms. Holli, is the effect on mind-sets that quotas can have. "Eventually, people start to think it's normal to have both sexes in government."
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