MB and elections: Egypt vs Jordan

The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood faced an impossible situation in last month's Shura Council elections.  Highly controversial Constitutional revisions designed to prevent its legitimate political participation had come into effect, large numbers of Brothers including some of the most senior leaders were in prison, and the government was fairly explicit in its plans to fix the elections against whatever Brotherhood candidates ran.  Despite all that, the Brotherhood contested the elections, putting out a quite liberal 72 page platform and attempting to run in multiple districts.  When the results were announced, not a single Brotherhood candidate was declared the winner - leading even the fiercely anti-MB former intelligence chief Fouad Allam to pronounce the results highly implausible.   

While the decision to participate in a fixed game was internally controversial, Essam el-Erian argued that participation carried benefits well beyond winning or losing.  The MB's participation forced the judiciary into greater role interpreting the constitution, put the higher council for elections on the spot, and cast a sharp spotlight on regime contradictions and hypocrisies.  What's more, argued Erian, it revived the general sense of importance of participation, forced movement inside the NDP, brought new MB figures from the third and fourth ranks into the public eye and trained them in new forms of outreach, and denied the regime a monopoly on the public sphere.   I would add that the MB's decision to contest the Shura Council elections  spoke volumes about the organization's real commitment to democratic participation - if there were ever a time when a boycott would have been understood, it was now (and indeed other opposition parties called for one). But they didn't.   In the end, I think they were vindicated, as they came out looking like determined democrats while the regime came across as a blundering, anti-democratic behemoth... not that this will evidently cost them any US military aid.

What made me think about last month's Egyptian elections right now was the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood's decision to withdraw its candidates from today's municipal elections.   Fears of an "Islamist victory" in these elections were always exaggerated - the Jordanian MB had put forward only 33 candidates, out of almost 3000 total, so couldn't exactly have swept the board.  But then at the last minute  the MB pulled its candidates from the contest. It claimed that the signs of impending electoral fraud were overwhelming and insurmountable:  blocking of voting booths, stuffing of the electoral rolls, harrassment and arrests of MB candidates and journalists...  the usual.  But all of that is standard procedure and could hardly have come as a surprise.   In a statement explaining its withdrawal, it claimed that the last straw was "secret information" it had received that members of the armed forces had been ordered to vote against the MB's candidates and been bused in to make sure that they voted.  Maybe.   More likely, it anticipated a weak showing and panicked, figuring that pulling out would delegitimize the election (it is calling the municipal elections an insult to Jordanians and damaging to the nation).  But the decision to pull out at the very last minute has allowed the government to seize the high ground, with Prime Minister Marouf Bakhit declaring that such a last-minute boycott is unprecedented and illegal.

Boycott decisions are always a tricky thing.   By not participating, the Jordanian MB cedes any role in the municipalities, and allows its enemies to challenge its commitment to democracy.  On the other hand, participating in a rigged game would legitimize the process, and would allow its enemies to claim that its poor showing proved its declining influence and popular appeal.  The contrast with the Egyptian MB is quite telling, though.   The Egyptian MB scored a real moral victory by participating and losing, demonstrating its democratic credentials and making the regime and the NDP look absurd.  By pulling out at the last minute like this, the Jordanian MB is likely to have hurt itself more than the regime, and will likely feed the public questioning of its real attitudes.  I suppose they will claim credit for the low turnout, which has forced the polls to stay open for several more hours in order to get to the legal threshold of 50.1% (despite the declaration of a national holiday to facilitate voting), but somehow I don't think that you need a Brotherhood boycott to explain low turnout for a municipal election...

Beyond the municipal elections (which are only of limited importance, really, and the MB also boycotted them outside of Amman in 2003), most analysts will be looking at the likely implications for the Parliamentary elections scheduled for November.   Most have doubted that that the MB would boycott the Parliamentary elections (if they are actually held), given the negative experience of their 1997 boycott and the region-wide wave of Islamist electoral victories.   Now the odds of a MB boycott of the Parliamentary elections have probably gone up.  The Jordanian government would probably be thrilled if the MB decided to boycott those elections.  Its greatest fear is Islamist electoral success, which is unlikely under the current electoral law but not impossible, and it would probably prefer to pay the legitimacy costs of an MB boycott than risk the political costs of either an MB victory or having to resort to overly obvious electoral fraud.  Bakhit's government, which admits no wrongdoing, will likely do things the exact same way in November, especially since it now knows which buttons to push.   The Jordanian MB, for its part, may not be up to an electoral test and may prefer to not contest them.  The Brotherhood is by many accounts really struggling with internal divisions over the Hamas takeover of Gaza, and its reputation has taken a beating over the last year or two (the Zarqawi funeral affair, poor Parliamentary performance, and more).  Perhaps it would prefer to sit the election out for fear of exposing its weakness, particularly since it now looks likely that those elections will be held under the much-criticized old electoral law despite all efforts at reform. 

Parliamentary elections without the MB, however tempting this looks to the Jordanian regime or to the US, would not be a good thing for Jordanian democracy or politics. For all its problems, the MB remains Jordan's largest political party, in a system otherwise dominated by tribes, personalities, and regime patronage. While I'm not particularly impressed with the Jordanian MB, given the trends across the region and Jordan's very real political, economic, and social problems I'm skeptical of the many reports of the MB's decline.  Better by far to have the MB engaged in the political realm than losing support to more radical competitors, and better to have a Parliament which at least somewhat approximates the real distribution of opinion in the Kingdom.   In Jordan as in Egypt, you can't have anything meaningfully democratic when the primary political opposition is shut out of the game.  We'll see how this all plays out for November.   As of today, though, the Egyptian MB is looking rather better than the Jordanian MB in terms of sticking to the democratic game despite the obstacles.   

Comments

[Patrick]

Marc~

How much of the Egyptian variant's successes can be laid at the feet of Mubarak's more heavy-handed approach? Your analysis gives one the impression that the Jordanian MB is marginalizing itself, when in fact, some credit (in the same way one should credit Karl Rove) should go to a more subtle approach by Abdullah II and his cronies. From the way you tell it (and so far, I've seen no better narrative), it seems the Jordanian mukhabarat backed al-ikhwan into a corner, and their only choice was a humiliating withdrawal.

[aardvark]

Yes, I think there's a lot to that - the Jordanians have long been absolute masters of the gerrymandering, political engineering game, whereas the Egyptians are rather crude and obvious about it.

[Fouad]

the reason the Jordanian IAF fielded about 33 candidates only was due to the intense vilification campaign they have been subjected to by the jordanian regime months before. Many Jordanians who support the IAF and their anti-corruption, anti-imperialism, pro-democracy platform, were too afraid to be identified with them openly. The poor showing of the MB in Jordan is a result of official intimidation campaign by the regime not lack of popularity of the islamists.

[issandr]

I would see the Jordanian MB's decision to only field a few candidates as a sign of the strong control the regime holds over the political field, whether that control in Egypt is getting weaker -- paradoxically, hence the need to resort to violence and obvious fraud on election days. The Egyptian MB knows this, and especially knows Mubarak's days are numbered because of his age if not because of his grip on power, and are taking advantage (within reasonable limits, since they only fielded about 120 candidates out of a possible 444 in 2005 and 19 out of 84 in 2007) of the general latent political uncertainty to make advances. Neither group feels it has a shot in hell of immediately making a difference, but the potential for a real breakthrough is much closer in Egypt than in Jordan -- not because the former is more liberal and permissive, but because it is less in control of things. Also, we must remember the Egyptian MB (and presumably the Jordanian one) is also constantly re-negotiating its position vis-a-vis the regime or at least elements of it, in part tactically and in part because of internal debate within those groups (or else why would Mahdi Akef say things like Mubarak is a respectable man and he regrets that some Brothers have spoken disparagingly of him, as he did a few days ago in the press?)