• Live
    • Audio Only
  • google plus
  • facebook
  • twitter
News > Latin America

Women the 'Vanguard' of Venezuelan Elections

  • Venezuela's electoral council took steps to increase female political participation.

    Venezuela's electoral council took steps to increase female political participation. | Photo: AVN

Published 18 November 2015
Opinion

For the 2015 national elections in Venezuela, parties must aim for a 50/50 divide between the sexes.

Women are crucial to the Bolivarian process and will play a vital role in Venezuela’s national elections this year, United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) legislator and candidate Tania Diaz told teleSUR on Wednesday.

For the first time this year, Venezuela’s electoral council has introduced a rule that for the 2015 elections for the National Assembly, parties must aim for a 50/50 divide between the sexes, and at the very least 40 percent of candidates must be women.

While opposition parties have just met the limit, the PSUV has exceeded it with half candidates female, and this year, an unprecedented 671 (37.3 percent) of the 1,799 candidates to the National Assembly are women.

INTERVIEW: Venezuelan Elections Matter for Global Resistance

“This was a resolution of the president of the National Electoral Council, Tibisay Lucena, who is a woman and feminist,” Diaz told teleSUR.

According to the socialist representative, the initiative to introduce quotas for women also came from women in opposition parties, who struggled to gain representation in parliament.

“So in this respect the demands of women of the opposition sectors and women of the revolution were joined,” she said.

The new levels of female participation in politics in Venezuela are impressive when contrasted with average figures in Latin America, which, despite the presence of several state leaders including Cristina Fernandez, Dilma Rousseff and Michelle Bachelet, are depressingly low. Across the region, women hold around 20 percent of seats in the legislatures.

In Venezuela however, since the election of Hugo Chavez in 1999, women have taken prominent positions in government and society. The late president took a special interest in promoting female participation, and said in 2010, “I am a feminist. I fight and will fight without truce, because the Venezuelan woman occupies the space that she has to occupy: in the heart, in the soul of the new homeland of the socialist revolution.”

ANALYSIS: Peace at Stake in Venezuela's Upcoming Assembly Elections

The country’s first female defense minister, Carmen Melendez, was appointed in 2013, and today many of the country’s top posts, including foreign minister, president of the supreme court of justice, and president of the electoral body, are held by women.

Diaz told teleSUR that Venezuelan society is “centered” around women, with the majority of university students and grassroots spokespeople being female.

“So, we are at the vanguard of the collective construction that is Bolivarian socialism in the 21st century,” she said.

Comment
0
Comments
Post with no comments.