Bahrain goes to the polls on November 24 to elect members for parliament and the municipalities. As an expat who owns property in Bahrain I have been told that I can vote in the municipal elections for a councillor. Like, I suspect, the majority of expats in my position I have never done so. As someone who always took part in the electoral process when I lived in the UK, this jars a bit. Here are the problems. I do not know where to go to vote, I do not know which documents I need to take. My CPR, yes but do I need to take the deeds to my house or an electricity bill or what?
Assuming that I could, with a bit of effort, find these things out there is the main problem. I do not know who to vote for. When voting you should vote for the candidate that will best represent your interests, but in order to do that I need to know who they are and what they stand for. The streets are full of smiley faces beaming down at us from billboards but it’s all in Arabic. Much to my eternal shame in all the time I have been here I cannot read or speak Arabic. I did try when I first arrived and for a while I could read the letters but I was never encouraged by my colleagues. They were much more interested in speaking English to me than listening to my attempts at Arabic.
So that is the main problem. I just do not know who to vote for. Recently I had a conversation about this with a Bahraini and he mentioned that there must be a few hundred expats in Amwaj alone that own their homes and are eligible to vote. I mentioned the problem with the language and this got us into a discussion about it. We came up with this idea. If a candidate were to print some election leaflets outlining his policies in English and distribute them around Amwaj then I am pretty certain that they would pick up a number of votes, particularly if his policies were sympathetic to property-owning expats.
They could even put some instructions on the leaflet such as where to vote and what to take. If this type of leaflet were to be placed at my door, then I certainly would go and vote for them. The only issue then would be if the voting slip was only in Arabic. Then I would need someone to point out the correct name. I could of course learn to recognise the name in Arabic, but if faced with a different font then I may be in trouble.
So come on all you candidates for Amwaj. There are enough votes floating around here to possibly make the difference to you getting elected. So let’s see some English manifestos!