This Is a Revolution in Samoa’s Politics

In an ironic twist, Samoa – at least for now – has been prevented from installing its first female prime minister due to a constitutional amendment on gender quotas.

In a region where female political representation is low – with several Pacific Island states having no female members of parliament – Samoa instituted an electoral law in 2013 that mandates that at least 10 percent of the country’s parliament be comprised of women. Samoa was the first independent state in the Pacific that introduced a gender quota to its parliament and remains the only country to have such a law.

At the previous election in 2016, the country’s parliament contained 50 seats, making five elected women the threshold to meet. Yet, due to population increases, an extra seat was added to the legislature prior to this year’s election, held on April 9. Expanding the parliament to 51 seats complicated the necessary equations.

In the recent election, five women were again elected to the parliament, including the leader of the Fa’atuatua i le Atua Samoa ua Tasi (FAST) party, Fiame Naomi Mata’afa. FAST out-performed expectations to win 25 seats, equal to the long dominant Human Rights Protection Party (HRPP). The remaining parliamentary seat was won by an independent, who, after negotiations with the two parties, decided to join FAST, giving the party a slim majority and what seemed like the path to forming government.

However, with only five women elected to the parliament the Electoral Commission stipulated that “only 9.8 percent of the women membership was achieved after the general election.” The solution to this, implemented by the country’s ceremonial head of state, was the creation of an extra seat in the parliament to be awarded to a woman. The electoral commission’s calculations designated that this woman would be a representative of the HRPP, once again deadlocking the two parties.

FAST has filed a motion in the Supreme Court to have the decision to add an extra seat to the parliament be declared unconstitutional. While the legal wrangling over the election may take some time to sort itself out, and may even lead to a new election, the April vote was nonetheless a revolution in Samoan politics.

The Human Rights Protect Party (HRPP) has been in power since 1982, holding super-majorities in a number of the parliaments. They were seemingly an immovable force in the country’s politics. For a large portion of the Samoan population, the HRPP is the only governing political party they have ever known. The prime minister himself, Tuila’epa Sailele Malielegaoi, has been the head of government since 1998.

What is more remarkable is that the FAST party was only registered in July 2020, and Fiame only rose to its leadership in March 2021, a month before the election. Fiame had previously been a member of the HRPP and a former deputy prime minister. However, she and a number of other MPs split from the party over a controversial series of new laws dealing with issues of customary land rights and chiefly titles. Fiame and her supporters felt these laws weakened the role of the Supreme Court as a check on customary law, and sought to dictate the affairs of Samoan families concerning chiefly titles.

The tensions between customary laws and the political institutions Samoa inherited from New Zealand when it gained independence in 1962 remain a central component of Samoan politics.

Due to the party’s dominance of Samoan politics, HRPP expected that they would once again easily triumph in the April election. Entrenched political parties become so accustomed to power that they often struggle to see change coming. Of the country’s two main islands, the less developed Savai’i voted overwhelmingly for FAST.

However, the main undoing of the HRPP was a failure to adjust to a new voting system. Previously, Samoa’s electoral system was split between a number of single-member districts and constituencies where two representatives were elected. The HRPP previously flooded the ballots with candidates, enabling them to secure large majorities. But for this election a new system entirely of single member districts, elected by a first-past-the-post system, was established. FAST simply fielded a single candidate in each district, while HRPP continued to field multiple candidates, which split the party’s vote and allowed FAST candidates to win a large number of seats.

So while the HRPP won the popular vote, it found itself with a major political challenger for the first time. Even if the HRPP is able to find a way to secure another term, the country arguably now has a new political landscape, with a viable political force capable of holding the government to account. If FAST is able to overcome the constitutional hurdle of the parliament’s gender quota, then Samoa will find itself with another major political shift: its first female prime minister.