RAMALLAH, Tuesday, January 22, 2019 (WAFA) – Legislative elections will be held after the Central Elections Commission (CEC) says it is ready, member of Fatah Central Committee, Hussein al-Sheikh. said on Monday.
He said President Mahmoud Abbas met twice in one week with the head of the CEC, Hanna Nasser, in Ramallah, and asked him to start preparations for holding legislative elections and to get in touch with all relevant parties, including travelling to Gaza to talk with Hamas on this matter.
He expressed hope that Hamas will agree to holding elections, which he said is the only way to insure democracy and the rule of the people, which comes through the ballot box.
“The President and Fatah pledge to accept whatever the results of the elections are and who wins will rule the country,” he said in an interview on Palestine TV.
Al-Sheikh, who also heads the Civil Affairs Commission in the Palestinian Authority (PA), said the CEC needs between 90 to 100 days to prepare for elections and once this is done, the president will issue a decree setting a date for the legislative elections.
He stressed, however, that elections will not be held without occupied Jerusalem, which is a red line, and all the Palestinian territories.
“Elections should be held in a manner similar to the 2006 elections,” he said. “We will fight for that and will not agree to any vacuum in the legislative body, whose absence has hurt us all.”
The last elections were held in 2006 in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and which brought Hamas to power. However, following Hamas takeover of power in Gaza in July 2007 in a coup against the PA, the legislative council stopped functioning and has been dormant since then until the Constitutional Court dissolved it in December and called for holding new elections within six months.
Al-Sheikh told Palestine TV that the situation at home and the political developments demand holding new elections.
He said President Abbas told Nasser that as president of Fatah and the Palestinian people, he is ready to run in the elections as part of a national list with Hamas and other political parties regardless of their size.
He also called for forming a government from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and not a national consensus government as the case now, predicting that its formation could be soon.
Several PLO officials have called for forming a government from the PLO in light of changes in the political situation on the ground and after Israel has reneged on all the agreements it signed with the PLO in 1993 and with the United States adopting the Israeli narrative for a political solution.
The PLO government is supposed to take the country in the transition from an authority created by the Oslo accords to a state as declared by the United Nations in 2012.
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