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CEE NETWORK FOR GENDER ISSUES

Budapest, Ljubljana, Tallinn

Levstikova 15, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia

Phone: +386 1 2444 119, Fax: +386 1 2444 123, Mo:+386 40 885860 - sonja.lokar@siol.net

Women’s Lobby of Cyprus 50-50 Campaign for EU Elections

February 19- 21, 2009

Short Report

Women's Lobby of Cyprus invited me in my capacity of the CEE Network for Gender Issues Executive Director, to actively participate in their seminar on EU elections with the title: »Women in Decision Making: Overcoming barriers, Creating Change«.

The seminar, which was an essential part of the EWL 50-50 campaign in Cyprus, was organized in cooperation between Women's Lobby of Cyprus, governmental gender equality machinery, representation of the EC in Cyprus, and Information Office of the EP in Cyprus.

The seminar took place in the EU House in Nicosia. 63 participants, coming from Greek, Turkish and migrants' women's NGO-s, from women's networks of Trade Unions, and women organizations from all parliamentary political parties. The chairwoman of the parliamentary committee for gender equality as well as high level representative from five parliamentary parties were there to present a newly passed National plan for gender equality and their views on women’s representation in Cyprus and in EU.

EU woman Commissioner from Cyprus, Androulla Vasilliou and Myria Vasiliadou, Secretary General of the EWL, originating from Cyprus, were the personalities attracting the attention of the public to this event.

The seminar was well covered by the national electronic and printed media, but the Carnival parade was shown instead of the reports from the seminar in national prime TV news.

After the seminar, I also gave an interview to the Cyprus Weakly – well known newspaper printed in English.

Background:

Cyprus has 800.000 of inhabitants, growing share of educated and employed women but big pay gap (26%), lousy institutions for balancing work and private life (which is now somehow bridged by massive domestic work of immigrant women, who take care of their households, children and dependent adults while Cypriot women work outside the homes), and one of the worst EU records on women in political decision making bodies at all levels.

Cyprus has 21% of women councilors, and only 3 women mayors in 33 communities, 14.29% women MP-s, only one woman minister, not one woman MEP and a woman Commissioner. Only 18% of women have higher positions in state administration, and only 20% of entrepreneurs are women.

In 2006, after a long strife, women succeeded to establish a committee for gender equality in the parliament and the parliament has just accepted its first National gender equality action plan. The country still has somje remains of openly discriminatory legislation, which treats differently women and men “refugees” – in fact internally displaced persons after the Turkish occupation of the island in the seventies of the former century.

Cyprus Constitution does not allow for special positive measures in the electoral legislation (legal quotas would have been considered as discriminatory against men), but three parliamentary parties are using quotas for their party organs and electoral lists (Democratic Rally, Democrats and Socialists). This has improved a little the presence of women in party decision making bodies and on the ballots, but did not change essentially the percentage of elected women on local and national elections. Communist said that they did not believe in the quota as a solution of a very complex problem, and that they would work firstly on crating favorable conditions for better balancing of private life, waged work and public activities of the women, while the Greens explained that they had had parity in the Statute, but when they dropped this regulation at their last congress, the % of women in the party leadership immediately fell down from 50% to 30%.

Four parties (Communists, Democrats, Rally, Democrats and Socialists) have established women's party organizations, but it came out that these organizations are not properly funded and have to do all their work on voluntary bases. There is no regulations obliging parliamentary parties to use a part of their budget for political empowerment of their women men members. Media ignore women’s party organizations, this is why they are invisible even for the civil society activists not to speak about general public, but they are the ones to formulate party gender equality policies and lobby for gender equality mechanisms and action plans.

The seminar:

The seminar was opened with a substantive speech of the Cypriot Commissioner for health, Androulla Vassiliou, who proved to be a serious supporter of gender equality in Cyprus as well as in EC.

Myria Vassiliadou,(she is a Secretary General of the EWL, coming from Cyprus), and me, we have spoken about EWL, its 50-50 Campaign and about the situation of women in decision making in Cyprus, Slovenia and elsewhere in Europe.

Lively discussion followed.

The following questions were opened:

• Why EU has never passed any binding legislation with regard equal political representation of women for all elected decision making bodies in the EU?
• How should voters support women candidates: voting for a woman candidate on the party list of their party of preference; voting for the best woman candidate regardless of her party affiliation; voting for the woman as an independent candidate or by creating a special women's party?
• How to diminish traditional mentality that snot only men, but also so many Cypriot women have internalized, accepting to the »second sex«, dependent on their man?
• How to deal with the fact, that the small number of women who succeeded to get elected, very often does not act as promoters of gender equality and can rarely serve as role models for other women?
• How can we better connect local, national, EU and global level in our strife for gender equality – the issue of the status of women refugees, for example, is not only the issue in Cyprus...
• Where can the parties find capable and visible women candidates for EU elections, and what to do to remove the barriers they have to overcome (triple burden, lack of money for campaigning, lack of institutional support, and discrimination of women politicians even in the state owned media)?
• What is EWL doing for the political education of young women?

After the coffee break, participants got the opportunity to listen and to discuss the issue of women in decision making and party electoral programs for forthcoming EU elections with the woman Chairwoman of the Parliamentary Committee for Gender Equality and the representatives from the following parliamentary parties: EDEK (Communists, now in power), Democratic Rally (right wing, EPP), Democratic Party (center), Socialist Party (PES sister party) and Cyprus Green Party. The first two parties sent male representatives.

The first round of the speakers’ presentations was rather general and showed that parliamentary parties are aware of the problem and admit that something has to be done, but they were very wage about possible solutions.

The most concrete was the representative from the Democratic Rally, who stood for the use of party quotas, for the code of conduct of public media, and for development of the institutions supporting parents to balance career and family and private life. The representative of the Democratic Party insisted especially on gender budgeting also with regard to the public money given to the parliamentary parties.

After the very concrete question from Miria Vassiliadou, (EWL) what these parliamentary parties intend to offer to the women voters and how many eligible (enough visible and respected) women candidates they intend to put on their lists, the participants got some more concrete answers.

The most clear and rather progressive was the position of the Democratic Rally – EPP sister party. Its vice president announced that his party intends to target women voters with a special programmatic letter, and to have at least one well known woman candidate and maybe even two on their party list. Communists, the governing party, up till this moment did not have anything concrete to offer – neither the electoral promise to women voters, nor the names of women candidates they plan for their list. Socialist Party presented the PES Manifesto chapter on gender equality. Its representative announced that one or two women will be on their list, but admitted that their focus will be to get at least one candidate elected, and this for sure will not be a woman (now they do not have any MEP – in 2004 they lost it for 37 votes!). Democrats had a clear proposal for a set of gender equality policies, following the recommendations of the CoE, but it was not clear if they have a solid solution for an eligible woman candidate. The Greens will have gender sensitive electoral program, might have a 50-50 list of candidates, but their chances to get anybody elected are slim.

The idea of financial fines for the parties who do not succeed to get elected agreed target of women candidates was rejected by all party representatives.

Concluding remarks:

The seminar reached the principal goal.

All parliamentary parties have understood that during this EU electoral campaign, they would be under the pressure and scrutiny of the women's civil society movement and that they will have to think about gender aspects of their electoral campaigns. The parties will for sure try to target women voters with special promises, as well as to find at least one eligible women candidate for the list of the biggest parties.

Only two parties stand a chance to get elected two MEP-s: Communists and Democratic Rally.

My impression is that the Communist might not have enough strong woman candidate, that Democratic Rally will try seriously to bring in a very respected new woman MEP, while all three smaller parties which can not get more than one MEP elected, will focus on their most visible and popular male candidate.

Cyprus has 6 seats in the European parliament. The whole country is one electoral unite, elections are proportional, names of the candidates are placed in alphabetic order. The country used to have obligatory voting which has created a culture of high turn out for all elections. The campaign is highly personalized. Voters are supposed to use their preferential vote. Better known and better off candidates, who have more means for the campaigning, and higher visibility in the media, stand better chances to be elected. By definition such candidates are men. The good news is that the recent research showed that the statement: “Women do not vote for women” is a myth. In fact, women voters do vote for female candidates in bigger proportions than male voters. 

Only with considerable additional effort, with more balanced presence of male and female candidates in the media, and open campaigning that preferential votes should be given to the woman candidate on the chosen party list, women's NGO-s might achieve that the new Cyprus national delegation to the EP acquires at least one woman MEP (17%).

Reporting: Sonja Lokar, Ljubljana, February 22, 2009

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