The Bahraini lower house of parliament has seen an unusual development in recent months: cooperation between opposition and pro-government factions on proposals to amend the kingdom's 2002 constitution. While the two groups differ on almost every subject, they share a desire to increase the powers of the body to which both belong.
But the deck is stacked against the parliamentarians, even when they clear the difficult hurdle of cooperation. Under the 2002 constitution, amendments are only possible with the approval of 27 of the 40 members of the elected lower house (House of Representatives) and the same number in the forty-member appointed upper house (Shura Council). The House of Representatives includes the opposition Shi’i al-Wefaq bloc (seventeen MPs), Sunni Salafist al-Asala bloc (eight MPs), Sunni Muslim Brotherhood al-Manbar bloc (seven MPs), Sunni al-Mustaqbal bloc (four MPs), three other Sunni MPs, and one MP of an independent liberal tendency. Generally this adds up to seventeen or eighteen votes for the opposition and twenty-two that are reliably pro-government. The 40 Shura Council members, however, are all considered to be in line with the will of the government and will never agree to any amendment that may not be accepted by top leadership.
Amending the 2002 constitution has been among the major goals of al-Wefaq MPs since they entered parliament in 2006, the first time the Shi’i opposition movement participated in national elections. Remarkably, al-Wefaq managed to convince many of its opponents in the lower house to support a set of amendments to expedite the legislative process, including:
- enabling the two houses of parliament to modify “laws by decree” issued by the king outside parliamentary sessions, which they currently may only accept or reject in their entirety;
- permitting elected members to question government officials about the reasons for not implementing non-mandatory motions passed by parliament;
- increasing the duration of annual sessions of parliament from seven to nine months;
- deleting an article that empowers the government to impose a limit of fifteen days for each house to approve bills relating to financial and economic matters, after which the king may pass the bill as law without legislative approval;
- requiring the government to solicit elected members’ views on the government’s policy statement;
- giving supervision of proposed bills and constitutional amendments to a committee of the elected lower house rather than a government office;
- requiring government budgets to be submitted annually rather than for several years at a time.
The pro-government blocs in the lower house rejected, however, some of al-Wefaq’s other proposed amendments that would directly take powers away from the upper house, such as:
- reducing the size of the appointed Shura Council from 40 to twenty members;
- giving the lower house the final say on bills that do not gain a majority of votes in the two chambers;
- designating the speaker of the lower elected house as the chair of any combined session (currently the prerogative of the Shura speaker);
- authorizing the speaker of the elected lower house, instead of the Shura, to transmit bills to the government.
Thus far negotiations between the blocs of the lower house are moving slowly. The blocs will meet again in April but are unlikely to reach a workable agreement despite their statements to the contrary. And the fact remains that even if they do agree on a proposed set of amendments, they would need to gain the support of 27 of the appointed Shura members, nearly an impossible task.
Al-Wefaq’s MPs will get one thing, however, out of all these tedious and probably fruitless negotiations. They will be able to go back to their constituents and prove that they tried hard to change parts of the constitution, as promised during their election campaigns. It remains to be seen how well that will work to shore up public support for al-Wefaq in view of constant campaigns from other opposition movements (such as Haqq) that eschew participation in a system they view as fundamentally unfair.
Mansoor al-Jamri is editor-in-chief of al-Wasat newspaper.
