The debate on a perceived government plan to amend the electoral constituencies and the voting system heated up yesterday amid warnings that the change before the election and outside the National Assembly could trigger protests.

Several opposition MPs insisted that a change to the electoral districts through a so-called “emergency decree” could take the country into a dark tunnel while others warned the consequences will be costly.

The leftist Progressive Movement rejected in a statement any change to the election law while the liberal Kuwait Democratic Forum called for referring the system to the constitutional court to rule if it was in line with the constitution.

The new developments came as Arabic language newspaper Al-Anbaa published what it described as a study by the government proposing major changes to the electoral constituencies and also to the voting system.

Under the existing system, Kuwait is divided into five constituencies with each electing 10 MPs while each voter is allowed to chose a maximum of four candidates in his/her constituency.

Introduced in 2006, the system has been criticized for being unfair with regard to the distribution of voters among the electoral districts. For example, the second constituency has the lowest number of voters with 47,000 compared to 120,000 voters in the fifth constituency.

The government study proposes to bridge the gap between districts by transferring residential areas among the different constituencies making the number of voters between 76,000 in the second to around 90,000 in the fifth constituencies.

But it appears that the proposed changes will greatly impact the structure of the National Assembly politically, socially and even on sectarian lines. The study also proposes to cut the number of candidates a voter can pick up to just one from the current four.

Opposition MP Mussallam Al-Barrak called on the government to deny the story published in the newspaper about the amendment plan and warned that failure to do so and going ahead with the plan will take the country into a dark tunnel.

MP Waleed Al-Tabtabai said that the government aims to playing with the outcome of the forthcoming assembly election by amending the electoral system without allowing the National Assembly to take part.

Tabtabai warned that the consequences of such a change would be very serious because the change amounts to a forgery to the will of the people.

Hamad Al-Matar, a member of the scrapped 2012 assembly, said that emergency decrees do not apply to the issue of changing the electoral system and accordingly should be done in cooperation with the national assembly.

The Progressive Movement said that the attempt by the government to change the electoral law does not aim at achieving justice and a fair distribution of voters but to alter the outcome of the elections to better control the National Assembly.

In a related development, Speaker of the National Assembly Jassem Al-Khorafi is expected to invite members of the 2009 assembly, reinstated by a court ruling last month, to hold its first meeting at the end of July.

The meeting is not expected to take place because many MPs plan to boycott the session, especially the opposition MPs. If the session fails to take place, Khorafi is expected to invite the assembly for another meeting.

If MPs continue to boycott the meetings, Khorafi will refer the issue to HH the Amir who is expected to issue a decree dissolving the assembly and calling for fresh polls.