Bahrain's politics: a king's government beside a half-elected parliament

How the constitution divides power

The Al Khalifa family has ruled since 1783, and the constitution of 2002 keeps the executive with the monarch. In Wikipedia's summary of the system, the king appoints the prime minister and the ministers, commands the Bahrain Defence Force, chairs the Higher Judicial Council, appoints the upper house of parliament and may dissolve the elected lower house. In 2010 about half the cabinet came from the ruling family. Article 2 of the constitution makes sharia a principal source of legislation.

Bahrain has had two constitutions. The first was drafted by a Constituent Assembly elected in 1972 by native-born men aged twenty or over, and enacted by decree in December 1973. It created a single chamber, the National Assembly, of 30 members elected by male citizens and 14 ministers sitting ex officio. That Assembly sat for less than two years: it refused to pass a State Security Law allowing detention without trial, and in August 1975 the emir dissolved it and governed by decree.

The second followed the referendum of 14 and 15 February 2001, in which 98.4% voted for the National Action Charter. The charter promised a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament; the constitution issued a year later turned the emirate into a kingdom, gave women the vote and created a parliament of two chambers. The opposition's objection, stated at the time and repeated since, is that the appointed chamber was given at least equal weight to the elected one.

How a bill passes the two chambers

The Council of Representatives has 40 members elected for four years in single-member constituencies, by absolute majority, with a run-off where no candidate wins one in the first round. The Shura Council has 40 members appointed by the king. A bill needs both. Once they have approved it the king may issue it or return it within six months, and a returned bill becomes law only with two-thirds of both councils. Wikipedia's article on the country, drawing on its sources, describes the appointed council as exercising a de facto veto over the elected one. DFAT, the Australian foreign ministry, describes the Shura Council as having limited legislative powers.

Parties are banned. A law of 1989 prohibits them, and an amendment in 2005 legalised political societies in their place, according to the IPU's Parline database. Candidates therefore stand as independents or for a registered society, and the societies that mattered most are the ones that have since been dissolved.

The constituencies are drawn unevenly. Minority Rights Group reports that in past elections the Northern Governorate, where Shia voters predominate, had more than 91,000 voters and elected nine members, while the Southern Governorate, mostly Sunni, elected six members from about 16,000 voters. The opposition calls this gerrymandering; Wikipedia's article uses the same word for the constituencies.

Why the opposition boycotted and then returned

The demand for an elected parliament is older than the present constitution. In 1992, 280 public figures petitioned for the return of the 1973 Assembly and its constitution, and the government refused; the unrest that followed from 1994 cost about forty lives, and after hotel and restaurant bombings in 1996 the government arrested more than 1,000 people and held them without trial. The 2002 settlement was the answer to that decade, and the argument since has been over whether it went far enough.

Al Wefaq, the largest Shia political society, boycotted the first election of October 2002 in protest at the appointed chamber, and the authorities put turnout at more than 50%. It returned in 2006 and won the most seats, and in 2010 it held 18 of the 40. Its strength rested partly on the clergy: Wikipedia's politics article quotes a senior cleric in the Islamic Scholars Council claiming 150,000 votes at the clerics' disposal, and describes the senior Shia cleric Isa Qassim as consulted on most of the society's decisions. The 2006 election also produced the first woman elected to the Council of Representatives.

The sectarian arithmetic behind this is what the opposition's case rests on. Minority Rights Group estimates that 60 to 65% of citizens are Shia and 30 to 35% Sunni. The ruling family is Sunni, and Britannica describes the government as Sunni-dominated. Minority Rights Group reports that Shia citizens have been excluded from the civil service, the army and the judiciary; Shia complaints of discrimination in jobs and government services are a charge that, Reuters reports, the authorities reject.

The eighteen Al Wefaq members resigned their seats in February 2011 after protesters were killed, and a by-election on 24 September 2011 filled them. Shia opposition groups withdrew from the national dialogue in September 2013, the government suspended it in January 2014, and the opposition boycotted the elections at the end of that year.

What happened to the opposition after the uprising

The government's account and its critics' differ on almost every point, and the sources name both. Bahrain's authorities have described the unrest since 2011 as stirred up by Iran, which Tehran denies, and point to bomb attacks on the security forces. The king's commission of inquiry in 2011 found no evidence of Iranian instigation, and rights groups describe a campaign against the Shia majority's political representation.

What is not in dispute is the sequence. A court ordered Al Wefaq dissolved in July 2016, and the secular left-wing society Wa'ad was dissolved in 2017. The leader of Al Wefaq was sentenced to life imprisonment in November 2018 on charges of spying for Qatar, which rights organisations called politically motivated. Hundreds of people lost their citizenship, among them the senior Shia cleric Isa Qassim, and in January 2017 three Shia men convicted of killing three police officers in a 2014 bombing were executed, the first executions in six years in the BBC's count. Minority Rights Group reports that the confessions were reportedly extracted under torture and that the UN condemned the executions as extrajudicial killings.

Freedom House, in its report on 2024, describes a Sunni-led monarchy that dominates state institutions and elections that are neither competitive nor inclusive, and rates the country Not Free. The same report records four mass pardons in 2024 that released 3,482 prisoners, more than 800 of them regarded by rights groups as political prisoners, and more than 300 political prisoners still held at the end of the year.

How the last parliamentary election was run

The Council of Representatives was elected on 12 November 2022, with a second round for seats undecided in the first. The government put first-round turnout at 73%, and the IPU records 73.18%, which the government described as the highest since 2002. Reuters counted 344,713 eligible voters, down from 365,467 in 2018, and 334 candidates for the 40 seats. The count of women candidates depends on the source: 73 in the IPU's figures, 94 in the authorities' figures reported by Reuters. Eight women were elected, up from six in 2018.

The authorities called the vote free. Amnesty International criticised rules that barred members of dissolved opposition societies and anyone who had served a prison sentence of more than six months, and the London-based Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy called it a sham. The justice ministry said that people left off the voter list for not voting before had been given the chance to register.

The next election is where the sources part. DFAT gives November 2026 as the next scheduled vote. The IPU records a royal order of 29 April 2026 extending the terms of both the Shura Council and the Council of Representatives by one year, effective from 12 December 2026.

Who Bahrain stands with abroad

How the American alliance grew

The United States Navy has had a presence in Bahrain since 1948, and took over the Royal Navy's site at independence in 1971. The base at Juffair became the headquarters of the Fifth Fleet, with about 6,000 American personnel in Wikipedia's figure. The United States designated Bahrain a major non-NATO ally in 2001, a free trade agreement took effect in August 2006, and in 2023 the two signed the Comprehensive Security Integration and Prosperity Agreement, which Britain accepted an invitation to join in December 2024. Britain reopened a permanent naval base, HMS Jufair, in April 2018.

The Bahrain Defence Force numbers about 8,200 people, most of them in the army, with a separate National Guard of about 2,000; its equipment, including F-16 fighters, is largely American.

Why relations with Iran stay tense

Relations with Iran have been tense for most of the period since independence, in Wikipedia's description. The government blamed Iran for the coup attempt of 1981 and for unrest in the 1990s, cut diplomatic relations in 2016 after the Saudi embassy in Tehran was stormed, and joined the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen in 2015. Wikipedia's article on the country records that when the United States and Israel struck Iran on 28 February 2026, Iran answered with missile and drone strikes on American bases and allies in the region, including Bahrain, which suffered damage and civilian casualties; in July 2026 Bahrain carried out airstrikes on Iran for the first time.

Where the Gulf neighbours fit

Bahrain was a founder of the Gulf Cooperation Council in May 1981 and follows Saudi Arabia's lead in most foreign policy, in Britannica's description. The break with Qatar is dated differently by different sources: Wikipedia's history of Bahrain places it in the Gulf crisis of 2017 and records an agreement to restore relations in April 2023, while DFAT dates it to June 2018 and records the GCC summit agreement of 5 January 2021. It established diplomatic relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords, signed in Washington on 15 September 2020. In 2026, DFAT records, Bahrain held the presidency of the GCC and a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

How the courts and the law work

The court system mixes Sunni and Shia sharia, tribal law and civil codes, a structure built with British advisers in the early twentieth century. The Supreme Judicial Council, created in 2000 to separate the courts from the administration, is headed by the king. The State Security Law and the State Security Court, which had allowed detention without trial for up to three years, were abolished after 1999.

Family law is the place where the clergy's political weight has shown most clearly. In 2005 the government withdrew the Shia section of a proposed family law after more than 100,000 people marched against it; clerics argued that neither elected members nor the government could change a law drawn from religion, and women's activists had supported codification. The commission of inquiry of 2011 found state media coverage at times inflammatory and recommended that the government consider relaxing censorship. Journalists risk prosecution for offences that include undermining the government and religion, and the opposition daily Al-Wasat has been banned.

Women gained the vote and the right to stand in 2002. None was elected that year, and six were appointed to the Shura Council instead, which also seats members of the Jewish and Christian communities. The first woman minister was appointed in 2004, and the first elected woman member entered the lower house in 2006.