Municipalities of the Arab Union

Municipalities (Arabic: بلديات baladiyāt; sing. بلدية baladiyah) form the lowest tier of local government in the 20 republics of the Arab Union, immediately below districts which are themselves subordinate to the governorates. Municipalities are responsible for providing most local government services within their district, such as basic water and road infrastructure as well as collecting property taxes and overseeing rental and other housing markets.

Municipal governments can be one of two forms: mayor–council governments, the more common form, consist of a popularly elected Mayor (عمدة ‘amdah) who appoints fellow party members or other peers to his cabinet, which is known as the Municipal Council (مجلس البلد majlis al-balad); council–manager forms, which account for just under two-fifths of municipal governments in the union, instead have a popularly elected multiple-member Municipal Council, who appoint from amongst themselves a Manager (مدير mudīr) to handle routine executive decisions who is accountable to the Municipal Council. Mayoral/council elections take place every four or five years, depending on the jurisdiction. A mayor can dismiss and re-appoint Municipal Council members, and can himself be removed from office by a two-thirds public referendum of the municipality's constituents. Council–manager municipal governments allow for the Manager's dismissal and replacement by the Municipal Council, which can itself be removed from office by the same referendum process used to remove the Mayor in mayor–council governments; in both forms of government, the removal from office of a mayor/council requires the holding of new municipal elections within two months.

All urban and semi-urban communities within the 20 member republics are part of one or more municipalities; these are officially named either "cities" (مدن mudun; sing. مدينة madīnah) or "towns" (قرى qurā; sing. قرية qiryah), depending on whether or not the municipality's resident population exceeds 10,000. Many rural communities form geographically large but sparsely populated incorporated municipalities called "townships" (بلدات baldāt; sing. بلدة baldah); the small hamlets of a township are called "villages" (نجوع nujū‘; sing. نجع naj‘), which make up the bulk of a township's population in addition to any farms located in the township. Many other rural communities, including a majority of farmland, do not form part of any incorporated municipality, and as such have to rely directly on their district government for the provision of all local services.

Many larger cities across the Arab Union, which due to progressive incorporation of a growing area into a single municipality would otherwise consist of single municipality within a single particular district, instead have merged the municipal and district levels of government into a single jurisdictions. In such cases, the consolidated district–municipality government functions as any regular municipal government (see below), but is additionally responsible for the provision of all services in its area normally handled by district governments. Such consolidation of local government is taken one step further by the six largest cities in the Arab Union: Cairo, Baghdad, Riyadh, Amman, Alexandria and Beirut; these cities consist of one municipality, district and governorate merged into a single jurisdiction. Similarly, the federal capital of Suez, which is not part of any republic, forms a single municipal jurisdiction encompassing the entirety of the federal district, whose municipal government's powers of local government are devolved directly from the Arab Union federal government rather than one of the federated republics as is the case with other municipal governments. Suez and the six triple-consolidated municipalities each use the mayor–council form of government; due to their simultaneous status as governorates in and of themselves, the official title of the mayor in all seven municipalities is "Mayor–Governor" (محافظ عمدي muḥāfiẓ ‘amdī), and like the governors in regular governorates, who are appointed directly by the Premier of the Republic, a mayor–governor can be dismissed by his premier (or directly by the Prime Minister of the Arab Union in the case of the Mayor–Governor of Suez), automatically triggering a new municipal election. Like in all other municipalities, the process of dismissing a municipal government and initiating fresh elections can also be done by two-thirds majority support in a public municipal referendum.