Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas issued a presidential decree on Friday ordering Palestinian national elections to be held within the next seven months, a move which could send Palestinians to the ballot box for the first time since 2006.
Abbas has promised elections several times since his four-year term was supposed to have expired in 2009. However, repeated attempts to hold votes for president and parliament have failed, largely due to the inability of rivals Fatah and Hamas to agree to terms.
According to the decree, which was published on Friday night, Palestinians across the territories — in East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank — will head to the ballot box on May 22, 2021 to vote for the Palestinian Legislative Council.
If all goes according to the decree, another two rounds of elections will be held afterward: on Saturday, July 7, 2021, they will vote for Palestinian Authority president, a position Abbas has held since 2004, and on August 31, 2021, they will vote a third time for the Palestinian National Council.
The Hamas terror group, Abbas’s rivals, welcomed the presidential decree and vowed to “fulfill the promise” offered by the move towards elections through negotiations over the election bylaws. Senior officials in Fatah and Hamas will reportedly soon head to Cairo to discuss some of the voting terms.
“It is necessary to expedite the holding of a comprehensive national dialogue in which all Palestinian factions participate without exception,” Hamas said in a statement.
Presidential elections were last called after Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat died in 2004. The last presidential elections were held on January 9, 2005, which ended with Abbas victorious.
Palestinian national elections have not been held since 2006, when Hamas took a majority of seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council. Abbas’s Fatah movement refused to sit with Hamas or give up control of its institutions, which it had ruled since the Palestinian Authority’s formation in the late 1990s.
The subsequent tug-of-war eventually led to a bloody struggle for control of the Gaza Strip. Hamas won, expelling Fatah to the West Bank. The Palestinian legislature has essentially been inactive since then, as most power has devolved to Abbas’s executive branch.
“Abbas may want to restore his legitimacy in front of the international community, after ruling for so many years without elections. The regional picture has also changed dramatically over the last few months, with the normalization agreements between Israel and the Arab states,” said Palestinian political analyst Jihad Harb. READ MORE
