Jordan: postponing the elections?

Postponing Jordan's elections?
Marc Lynch

At a roundtable with Arab journalists last Wednesday, Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs David Welch was asked about reports that Jordan would postpone next year's scheduled Parliamentary elections out of concern for an Islamist victory.   Welch ducked the question in favor of generalities about democracy.  Both the question and Welch's non-answer were telling.  Over the last two weeks, a controversy has indeed erupted in Jordan over the question of whether next year's scheduled Parliamentary elections will be held. 

The controversy began when a highly respected independent columnist, Samih al-Mayateh, penned a short piece arguing against a postponement.   This relatively innocuous intervention might have been passed over had not speculation in fact been raging in private political salons.  A series of columns followed, and then a taciturn semi-denial from a government spokesman.  Some observers have dismissed this as a non-issue, a straw man cooked up by Parliamentarians who enjoy their cushy jobs or by bored columnists looking to stir up trouble.  While anything is possible in King Abdullah's Jordan, I would agree that such a postponement is actually quite unlikely.  But the controversy is fascinating for what it reveals about the current state of affairs in the Hashemite Kingdom.

Why would elections be postponed?  The general answer is not hard to find:  because if elections were held today, the Islamists would supposedly win more than half the seats.   After the Hamas victory in Palestinian elections and the Muslim Brotherhood's performance in Egypt, the specter of Islamist success hangs over all Arab elections - and has become a major trump card in the hands of pro-American dictators looking to prevent meaningful democratization.   

Is the fear realistic?  Not likely.  The Jordanian electoral system is carefully gerrymandered to privilege regime loyalists and to hurt Islamists - particularly through the "one vote/multiple member district" rule, which means that most Jordanians tend to vote for a tribal or local candidate rather than an ideological one.   There is little real prospect that the Islamic Action Front could come within a mile of a Parliamentary majority given how thoroughly the electoral system has been engineered to prevent precisely that outcome.  Only 4% of Jordanians considered the IAF the most representative party in the September 2005 "Democracy in Jordan" survey, and only 2.5% named it as qualified to form a government.   And if the regime came to believe that the IAF could nevertheless win, it would likely find a way to provoke an Islamist boycott (as in 1997, when the government refused to give in to opposition demands to revise the electoral law and was rewarded with an IAF boycott that left Parliament devoid of significant opposition).   It's likely that publicly floated fears of an Islamist takeover have more to do with preparing American opinion in the event that something drastic needs to be done... or if Abdullah just grows bored with democracy or worries that any kind of political opening  might get out of hand.

The real fear may have less to do with the Islamists than with the ways in which the foundations of Jordanian loyalties have been rapidly shifting in recent years.  King Abdullah's policies have tended to grate on the traditionally loyal Transjordanian community, and have not served their economic interests well. Transjordanian "loyalists" in Parliament deadlocked a confidence vote for the liberal Adnan Badran's nomination as Prime Minister, keeping the King's appointee in limbo for months, and have been among the strongest opponents of various political reform measures.   That those safe seats might no longer be so safe for the King's agenda may play some role in a new willingness to entertain suggestions for revisions to the long-controversial electoral law.  A new electoral law was in fact one of the key - and most contested - of the recommendations of the National Agenda... but to this point, there has been little evidence that one will be produced in time for the 2007 Parliamentary election.

The fears are also linked to the chaos in the Palestinian areas, which has - amazingly - put Jordan's 1988 severing of ties with the West Bank back on the table.   A minor firestorm broke out over reports that the Jordanian government has formed a committee to review the 1988 decision to sever ties with the West Bank.   When the Interior Minister told a press conference that the separation from the West Bank was an issue which the government could legally review and that the government was considering revising passport and residency cards for Palestinians.  A former Justice Minister declared this to be a very dangerous step, both politically and legally (since  all laws passed since 1988 took the severing of ties as their basis).   While nothing much really seems to be going on here, there were immediate cries of outrage from both Jordanian nationalists and from Palestinians, each of whose identities and interests rest on this question being settled. (Interestingly, the one major political force in the Kingdom which does not accept the permanence of the severing of ties is the embattled Muslim Brotherhood.)   

In the past, the strong public consensus in favor of the severing of ties (reflected in official discourse - as in King Abdullah's 'Jordan First' campaign) would have been enough to keep it in place.  But Abdullah cares far less what Jordanians think than did his father. While King Abdullah has never demonstrated any great interest in democracy - he canceled Parliamentary elections in 2001, leaving the country without a legislative body for two years -  things had taken a turn for the worse  even before before the November 2005 Amman terror attacks.  Those attacks gave Abdullah the green light to implement a far-reaching set of illiberal reforms, including a draconian anti-terrorism law, heightened state control over mosques, and a general offensive against Islamism and the Muslim Brotherhood.  A recent series of focus groups found a general consensus that public freedoms had sharply declined, and considerable antipathy towards the political and economic status quo. Jordanians grumble about a return to a 'martial law mentality', if not yet practice.  In the most recent "Democracy in Jordan" survey by the Center for Strategic Studies, 77% of Jordanians said that they could not publicly criticize the government without fearing punishment.  July's "We are all Jordan" forum, which brought together some 700 politicians and civil society activists to talk about reform issues, at least aimed to revive some sense of participation for the Jordanian political elite, which has been fuming over its relative marginalization from the National Agenda process and Jordan's ever more unpopular foreign policy.  But with no policy-setting agenda, the Forum was little more than an expensive talking shop aimed at stroking these bruised egos. 

These setbacks in domestic political freedoms have been accompanied by an ever more active Jordanian role in advocating the American regional agenda - which is the primary reason that American officials have rarely complained about the illiberal Jordanian trend.  The cost of this will be an ever more unpopular and fragile monarchy.   While fears of an Iranian-style revolution are overblown, Jordan faces clear danger signs:  economic and political reform stalled, extremely unpopular foreign policy, public debate moving underground, sharpened confrontation with a popular Islamist movement.   Politically, Jordan today looks more like it did in 1986 than it did in 1996 (though it does have a lot more luxury hotels, Western fast food joints, and Iraqi refugees now).  The repression of the 1980s led to the fierce riots in 1989, which inspired King Hussein's limited democratic opening in the first place -- as a regime survival strategy.   At that point, the Muslim Brotherhood remained a trusted partner of the Hashemite monarchy, and carefully modulated the extent of its political opposition in order to support the system.    If history repeats itself, and an ever more repressive Jordanian regime faces renewed protests and public fury, who will stand by its side?

Note:  cross-posted from Abu Aardvark.

Comments

[Anonymous]

Interesting... You didn't write too much about the impact of having so many Iraqis recently come to Jordan, though. From what I've heard, the cost of living and housing prices have gone way up because of this, at least in certain areas of Amman. And are many of the Iraqis Shia? If so, is that causing any friction?

[aardvark]

It's a great question - I didn't write about it in part because I've asked a few people if they would write something specifically on that topic. Hopefully they will. I think you're right about both points - the impact on the economy (similar to the impact of returnees from the Gulf in the early 1990s) and the Shia angle (I posted something on AA a while back about unprecedented 'Shia threat' rhetoric in the Kingdom).

[Sean]

Comparisons between now and the late 1980s (which are admittedly common among public policy critics in Amman) are politically bold, but the economic differences are vast. In terms of unrequitted capital transfers (e.g., external grants), foreign reserves, and debt servicing, the Central Bank/Ministry of Finance/Ministry of Planning have forged a much more healthy budgetary outlook. One reason is that the IMF program in the 1990s, despite some nagging externalities, largely succeeded in restructuring the government's fiscal priorities (thanks also to Paris Club and bilateral donor generosities). Combined with a rejuvenated GID and the reassertion of royal (ie, diwan) primacy, it is highly unlikely that a domestic trigger, such as the loss of government subsidies on consumer goods, could cause mass rioting on the scale of April 1989, or even August 1996. An economist in Amman recently mentioned (anonymously, of course) that the oil price hikes of the last year relative to median income were quite comparable to the fuel hikes of 1989, taking into account inflation and PPP. Why the political quietism? Surely the paltry protests in the run-up to the Iraq War (even the US Embassy was surprised at their timidity) didn't blow off all the steam.

But the comparison to pre-1989 still makes some sense on the political level, especially in terms of the incumbent's credibility and popular support for the government (that is, cabinet, not the diwan). The royalists no longer have a political safety valve to unleash this time around; for true reformists, liberalization no longer wears the novelty it once did. Others see Jordan First, the National Agenda, the creation of the Political Development Ministry, and now We Are All Jordan as different shades of the same co-opting mechanism that the royalists have typically used to bring in potential, or known, opponents (anybody remember the Jordanian National Union?). The only problem is that the regime does not have another Gulf War to burnish its Hashemite credentials.
What's that classical Arabic mathal--"Maa ashbah al-yawm bil-baariha"? That does seem appropriate right now, at least politically. But if the regime does have something on its side, it is that there is little chance external powers will allow the kingdom to sink into an insolvency-driven spiral of political drift.

[aardvark]

Sean, those are really good points. The one flaw is that the GID was just as empowered and active in the late 1980s as it is today (remember the student protestors getting drilled at Yarmouk University in 86?), and that didn't prevent things from getting out of hand. If I had to speculate as to why things haven't (and likely won't) gone towards protest recently, I'd look at the patriotic rallying around the throne after the terrorist attacks, as well as the amount of externally-directed outrage (at the US and Israel). But terror rally effects wane over time, and the external outrage only ratchets up the tension... at some point, one of those thwarted marches on the Israeli Embassy may turn violent, or more violent than it has to date.

[Sean]

Well said--and if I recall it was none other than everyone's favorite Lower House Speaker who headed the student-bashing PSD then. Unsettling, when one remembers who the second-term President of JU was at the time...

[marwan asmar]

Everytime there is talk of a parliamentary election in Jordan there is also talk about postponment with many stating the pros and cons, the local factors against the regional and even the international factors. But the fact is we in Jordan need to have parliamentary elections on time regardless of our "situation" because simply stated there is never a good time, but there is a manageable time. Timely elections are good because they speak of a growing maturity of the political system and the strenght of the Kingdom's democratic institutions. So what if Islamists win or of people of any other political persuasion do so for that matter. The democratic experiment in Jordan has continued since 1989 and it has managed to blend in well with the prevailing social, political and economic institutions. If each time there is talk of a general election, there is a talk of the pros and cons, then all we are doing is wasting time and dithering about our political future. Thinking about the Hamas win in the Palestinian territories and comparing it with the Jordanian situation is not actually very productive because of the different context. Despite much talk about raising costs and other problems, Jordan today is changing like no other time in its history. Its changing social make-up with new stratas coming on the scene, not to speak of the up-wardly mobile, not to speak of the new job opportinities that are available, and its economic boom, influx of investments and even influx of Iraqis mean that the country is developing on a stronger footing, and that's why it needs strong political institutions like parliament as a wave of the new times and as a means of checks and balances.

[GC]

What are the prospects for local elections?