MANAMA, Nov 1: Religious radicals, mostly Sunnis, have grabbed nearly half the seats in the new parliament elected in Bahrain in the first legislative polls in three decades, official results showed on Friday.

In Thursday’s runoff vote, the radicasl topped up gains made in the first round a week earlier after the small Gulf state’s main opposition forces kept up a boycott of the ballot in protest at constitutional amendments they deemed undemocratic.

Fourteen Sunni and two Shias, in addition to a Sunni religious leader who ran as an independent, won mandates in the 40-seat parliament, the first to be elected since a legislative assembly was scrapped in 1975.

The 14 Sunnis are split equally between adherents of the Salafi persuasion and the Muslim Brothers. The latter include the head of the National Islamic Forum, the political association of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The two Shias are members of the Islamic League Association, which is close to the government.

Three liberals, two of them Sunnis and the third Shia, were also elected. The 20 remaining winners are independents whose bids for parliament were backed by either the government or the radicals.

At 27, Sunnis will be more than twice as many as Shias in the new parliament.

Two women candidates who made it to Thursday’s second round runoff vote failed to get elected, after a further six women candidates were eliminated in the first round.

Independent Lateefa al-Guoud, 46, one of the two women who reached the second round, seemed close at one point to becoming the first woman to be elected to parliament in any of the six conservative Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states before seeing her hopes dashed by her rival, a religious leader.

All 31 women who ran in municipal elections last May had been similarly knocked out of the race.

Four opposition groups, including the Islamic National Accord Association (INAA), the main Shia political grouping, boycotted the parliamentary elections.

They were protesting an amendment to the 1973 constitution stipulating that legislative power be split equally between the elected chamber and a consultative council to be appointed by Bahrain’s King Hamad.

INAA chief Sheikh Ali Salman said on Friday he was not worried by the new parliament’s Sunni majority “because our programme is national”.

The radicals’ strong showing “reflected the social reality in Bahrain and should be welcomed”, he said.

Stressing that his and the three other opposition groups had shunned the polls “due to the lack of a democratic spirit”, Salman said all political forces, both within and outside parliament, were agreed on “the importance of the constitutional issue”.

Abdul Rahman al-Nuaimi, whose leftist National Democratic Action Association was another of the four groups that boycotted the polls, said the new parliament would be weakened by the boycott and the “limited powers” granted the chamber.

—AFP