Holding elections to the Palestine Liberation Organisation's parliament may prove a challenging way to show real reform, experts told The National, after President Mahmoud Abbas announced Palestinians would be able to vote for their representatives for the first time ever.
The Palestinian National Council is the PLO's legislative authority and is supposed to represent all Palestinians both inside the occupied territories and abroad. It has more than 700 members, who are meant to reflect the support of different political factions, although Mr Abbas's Fatah is the dominant party.
And although elections in Palestinian politics are a rare occurrence, experts regard Mr Abbas's announcement as symbolic with very little direct effect on Palestinian lives.
“The PLO has no operational role and has been gutted and reduced over the last decades,” said Ghaith Al Omari, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The last full meeting of the PNC was held in 2018, for the first time in 22 years, despite its charter mandating an annual meeting.
“Abbas will represent this as a renewal or reviving of the PLO, which is necessary, but the PLO has bigger and deeper problems and you don't start solving them through these elections,” Mr Al Omari said.
Reforms
Mr Abbas has been increasingly under pressure by Arab and western states to make real and tangible reforms, particularly to the Palestinian Authority which oversees Palestinians residing inside the occupied state.
Conversations about reform took centre stage at the UN General Assembly last year, when the Global Alliance for the Implementation of the Two-State Solution was announced. Part of the alliance's aims is to help the PA make reforms.
There, Mr Abbas made promises that this year will be the year of elections – and that Palestinian government will become more democratic.
Last year, he appointed a potential successor in Hussein Al Sheikh, and a new prime minister in Mohammad Mustafa in 2024. But rampant corruption is a long-standing and continuing issue in the ruling PA.
So by holding elections in the PNC, not the Palestine Legislative Council – the PA's parliament – Mr Abbas is “not touching the elections that will impact the PA itself”, Mr Al Omari said.
The PNC's charter also mandates that elections are held to choose its members, but that has never happened. In 2021, Mr Abbas announced Palestinian Authority parliamentary elections but postponed due to Israel blocking people in East Jerusalem from voting. At the time, Mr Abbas said he would not allow elections to take place unless all Palestinians were able to participate.
Monday's presidential decree stipulates that voting will be held “wherever possible, both inside and outside Palestine”.
“The conditions that were in place in 2021 still exist,” Dalal Iriqat, associate professor of diplomacy at the Arab American University Palestine, told The National. She said that while there are no solid guarantees that the November elections will take place, they certainly would be welcome.
Fatah-Hamas
The elections could have another importance by forcing rival factions Hamas and Fatah to have serious conversations that are more than symbolic.
Hamas has lost its political grip over Gaza, particularly with the formation of a US-backed interim technical committee, which does not involve the armed group that has ruled Gaza for the past decade.
“There will have to be a lot more interaction between the two main factions to agree on some of the institutional reforms to the PNC and how elections can be conducted because this can be seen as a real effort to remedy the past dysfunction and see real elections take place,” said Palestinian human rights lawyer Zaha Hassan, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
In 2024, Hamas agreed to be part of a joint committee with Fatah in an Egypt-led initiative to reconcile the two. But the plan did not materialise as the PA, which is ruled by Fatah, said doing do would undermine the official Palestinian government.
Although more questions than answers remain, the seriousness of the circumstances under which Mr Abbas has called for elections may be the push that the President needed to bring real change and new blood to the dormant body.
