Omar Zghoul laughs when he ponders electoral reform. The 26 year-old Jordanian graphic designer and animator dismisses the utility of the legislature, even as parliamentarians debate a new election law that would for the first time ever allow political parties to run national lists in the Hashemite Kingdom.
Corruption runs too deep among elected representatives, Zghoul lamented last week as he sat in an Amman coffee shop. And anyway, he added, voters just cast ballots for members of their tribe or clan, creating a parliament of individuals focused on providing services to their constituents -- not governing the country.
“We vote in elections for the parliament, but the parliament is hollow,” he said, puffing on a cigarette.
For the past year, Jordanians have demanded reforms similar to those in nearby Arab countries: economic and social justice, more representative government, and an end to corruption. But the government’s response, compared to the sweeping changes taking place from Egypt and Tunisia to Syria and Libya, has been rather muted.
Debate has centered on the country’s election law, which Jordan has altered several times since King Hussein restarted parliamentary elections in 1989 after a 22 year break. The most recent iterations of the law have empowered rural areas, where tribal Jordanians, or East Bankers, live, at the expense of urban populations, where most Palestinians and supporters of Islamist groups reside. The current law has been dubbed “one person, one vote,” and it takes advantage of heavily gerrymandered districts to ensure the election of a parliament loyal to King Abdullah II.
“The parliament’s role has declined in the last 20 years. One of the reasons for this decline was the ‘one person, one vote’ law,” Mohammed Al Masri, a researcher at the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan, told me. “You cornered the voters, and it influenced the voting behavior of the Jordanian people, to the extent that the Jordanian people started voting” for segmented groups of society in order to have a representative in parliament who deals with providing his constituency social services, he explained.
The new law, analysts and members of the opposition said, will do little to change this reality.
Instead of one vote, each Jordanian casting a ballot will now choose three candidates, two in enlarged local districts and a third from a national party list. It would mark the first time political parties are able to field national lists – with proportionally assigned seats -- but would not even come close to opposition demands for 50 percent of seats elected proportionally, since parties would compete for a total of just 15 slots out of 138. Any one party could win a maximum of only five seats, severely limiting the potential of the well-organized Islamic Action Front, the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm.
The law also raises the total number of seats by 18 and enfranchises rural women by increasing the women’s quota from 9 to 12.
The government submitted a draft of the law to parliament in early April, but at a press conference introducing it, the prime minister admitted that it fell far short of expectations. Nearly everyone I interviewed last week thought the security forces, the royal court, or some other actor other than the government had authored the draft.
It is clear that the proposal has only exacerbated activists’ anger and exposed a rift among decision-makers over whether they should start to give Palestinians more power and embrace Islamists, both of whom feel largely shut out of the state’s key political institutions. Opposition to the law has run rampant across newspaper columns and the airwaves, and Jordanians I spoke to generally lambasted the proposal as more of the same. Members of the budding opposition that sprouted up within the last year and a half have loudly expressed their disappointment.
In a sign of deepening discord within the upper echelons of power, Prime Minister Awn Khasawneh stepped down on Thursday after what appeared to be a disagreement with the king over how fast and in what manner electoral reforms should move through parliament. He had been in office just six months. The next day, more than 1,000 Jordanians took to the streets to protest his replacement, Fayez Tarawneh, who is viewed as being close to the king.
Even if the king is successful in pushing the law through parliament, it seems as if the fragmentation of Jordanian society will continue to fester and grow. While the monarchy might ride out the current wave of Arab uprisings relatively unscathed, without an effective plan to give power to the voiceless in the long term, the same problems may crop up again further down the road.
When it comes to long-term vision, Jordan’s Brotherhood might be among the most focused. Abdul Latif Arabiyat, a former speaker of parliament who on Monday ended his term as the head of the Brotherhood’s Consultative Council, said that gradual reform to a more representative, proportional party system is in Jordan’s interest.
“We don’t believe in changing the system in Jordan. We belief in reform -- just reform -- and gradual reform,” Arabiyat said.
The Brotherhood would like proportional party representation for the entire lower house of the parliament, he said, but for now, it, along with other groups, has called for 50 percent of seats to come from national lists. “We believe we need to raise the level of reform,” he said, adding that the Islamic Action Front would like to share power with other groups. “We are not looking for a majority.”
Yet skepticism toward any political movement in Jordan runs high, and not all agree with the Brotherhood’s declarations or intentions. Regardless, it looks like the status quo currently has the upper hand, and, if the current proposal becomes the law of the land, the cracks beneath the surface of Jordanian politics and society will only continue to grow deeper.
Ben Gittleson is a freelance journalist and a fellow at the Center for Arabic Study Abroad in Cairo, Egypt. Follow him on Twitter at @bgittleson.
Corruption runs too deep among elected representatives, Zghoul lamented last week as he sat in an Amman coffee shop. And anyway, he added, voters just cast ballots for members of their tribe or clan, creating a parliament of individuals focused on providing services to their constituents -- not governing the country.
“We vote in elections for the parliament, but the parliament is hollow,” he said, puffing on a cigarette.
For the past year, Jordanians have demanded reforms similar to those in nearby Arab countries: economic and social justice, more representative government, and an end to corruption. But the government’s response, compared to the sweeping changes taking place from Egypt and Tunisia to Syria and Libya, has been rather muted.
Debate has centered on the country’s election law, which Jordan has altered several times since King Hussein restarted parliamentary elections in 1989 after a 22 year break. The most recent iterations of the law have empowered rural areas, where tribal Jordanians, or East Bankers, live, at the expense of urban populations, where most Palestinians and supporters of Islamist groups reside. The current law has been dubbed “one person, one vote,” and it takes advantage of heavily gerrymandered districts to ensure the election of a parliament loyal to King Abdullah II.
“The parliament’s role has declined in the last 20 years. One of the reasons for this decline was the ‘one person, one vote’ law,” Mohammed Al Masri, a researcher at the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan, told me. “You cornered the voters, and it influenced the voting behavior of the Jordanian people, to the extent that the Jordanian people started voting” for segmented groups of society in order to have a representative in parliament who deals with providing his constituency social services, he explained.
The new law, analysts and members of the opposition said, will do little to change this reality.
Instead of one vote, each Jordanian casting a ballot will now choose three candidates, two in enlarged local districts and a third from a national party list. It would mark the first time political parties are able to field national lists – with proportionally assigned seats -- but would not even come close to opposition demands for 50 percent of seats elected proportionally, since parties would compete for a total of just 15 slots out of 138. Any one party could win a maximum of only five seats, severely limiting the potential of the well-organized Islamic Action Front, the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm.
The law also raises the total number of seats by 18 and enfranchises rural women by increasing the women’s quota from 9 to 12.
The government submitted a draft of the law to parliament in early April, but at a press conference introducing it, the prime minister admitted that it fell far short of expectations. Nearly everyone I interviewed last week thought the security forces, the royal court, or some other actor other than the government had authored the draft.
It is clear that the proposal has only exacerbated activists’ anger and exposed a rift among decision-makers over whether they should start to give Palestinians more power and embrace Islamists, both of whom feel largely shut out of the state’s key political institutions. Opposition to the law has run rampant across newspaper columns and the airwaves, and Jordanians I spoke to generally lambasted the proposal as more of the same. Members of the budding opposition that sprouted up within the last year and a half have loudly expressed their disappointment.
In a sign of deepening discord within the upper echelons of power, Prime Minister Awn Khasawneh stepped down on Thursday after what appeared to be a disagreement with the king over how fast and in what manner electoral reforms should move through parliament. He had been in office just six months. The next day, more than 1,000 Jordanians took to the streets to protest his replacement, Fayez Tarawneh, who is viewed as being close to the king.
Even if the king is successful in pushing the law through parliament, it seems as if the fragmentation of Jordanian society will continue to fester and grow. While the monarchy might ride out the current wave of Arab uprisings relatively unscathed, without an effective plan to give power to the voiceless in the long term, the same problems may crop up again further down the road.
When it comes to long-term vision, Jordan’s Brotherhood might be among the most focused. Abdul Latif Arabiyat, a former speaker of parliament who on Monday ended his term as the head of the Brotherhood’s Consultative Council, said that gradual reform to a more representative, proportional party system is in Jordan’s interest.
“We don’t believe in changing the system in Jordan. We belief in reform -- just reform -- and gradual reform,” Arabiyat said.
The Brotherhood would like proportional party representation for the entire lower house of the parliament, he said, but for now, it, along with other groups, has called for 50 percent of seats to come from national lists. “We believe we need to raise the level of reform,” he said, adding that the Islamic Action Front would like to share power with other groups. “We are not looking for a majority.”
Yet skepticism toward any political movement in Jordan runs high, and not all agree with the Brotherhood’s declarations or intentions. Regardless, it looks like the status quo currently has the upper hand, and, if the current proposal becomes the law of the land, the cracks beneath the surface of Jordanian politics and society will only continue to grow deeper.
Ben Gittleson is a freelance journalist and a fellow at the Center for Arabic Study Abroad in Cairo, Egypt. Follow him on Twitter at @bgittleson.
In the proverbial battle between seeing the whole forest or the individual trees, the “trees” in Jordan are the highly divisive details of its new draft electoral law, now under sharp debate in parliament and in the local press. But the “forest”–the larger picture–is that somehow Jordan’s streets seem mostly quiet, despite this raging political controversy. How can this be?
Ben Gittelson’s piece performs a useful service by drawing attention to new and intriguing Jordanian developments that have largely escaped the notice of Western media — and even of experts preoccupied with more sensational news from Syria or Egypt. In this second year of widespread Arab political instability, Jordan, like most of the remaining monarchies in the region, stands out so far as defying the odds by remaining relatively calm. Gittelson reminds us that this cannot be taken for granted. Buried in the details of Jordan’s new election law is a high-risk, high-wire balancing act that could conceivably backfire against the regime. The law appears aimed squarely at limiting the parliamentary power of the largest “loyal opposition” group, the Islamic Action Front, along with its many supporters of Palestinian origin. So King Abdullah’s government must now contend with their increased propensity to protest.
In just the past week, in large part as a result of this exclusionary initiative by the regime, this axis of political polarization has sharpened. First, as Gittelson mentions, relatively reformist prime minister Awn Khasawneh abruptly resigned, to be replaced by reputed hardliner Fayez Tarawneh. Next the Islamic Action Front re-elected its own hardline leader, Hammam Saeed, and announced that it would boycott further consultations on the election law–and probably, though not necessarily, the parliamentary election itself. Then, just yesterday, the parliamentary committee debating this law witnessed an actual shouting and shoving match among various deputies representing other contesting parties.
But the palace’s secret political weapon against this brewing confrontation, which must be added to Gittelson’s account, is the clear overture to the traditional Hashemite base: the country’s native East Bank minority. Many of them resent reforms that could empower the majority of Palestinian origin. And it was this East Bank base that, over the past year, had appeared increasingly shaky. East Bankers had started turning out, particularly in southern cities far from the capital, to demonstrate against the king and his Palestinian queen. In Amman, the old guard grumbled about losing control of the country’s politics, as they had already lost control of its economy.
Now, however, the new prime minister is the old guard incarnate. A Palestinian bloc vote will stay fragmented and constrained by the revised electoral law. And the regime has recently taken other, more symbolic steps to signal its distance from Palestinians: publicly threatening to revoke the citizenship of some officials from the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority; while quietly getting more involved in the affairs of East Jerusalem’s nearly 300,000 Palestinians, in competition with that Authority’s claims.
The wild card in estimating this new strategy’s chance of success is not political, but economic. Jordan is a perennially precarious, heavily state-managed and aid-dependent economy. East Bankers count disproportionately on government jobs, patronage, subsidies, and local development projects. And Jordan’s always fragile economy is currently suffering from major new disruptions–perhaps already costing as much as a few billion dollars–in two neighbors much more directly affected by the instability of the “Arab Spring”: continual interruptions in gas supply from Egypt, and in trade and transit revenues from Syria. As a result, if promised Gulf Arab aid keeps lagging, the king will be ever more hard-pressed to deliver the economic largesse on which the Hashemite dynasty’s base has always counted.
And yet, the Jordanian regime has so far always found a way to muddle through, precisely by vacillating and balancing between the country’s two major population groups. Not since the Black September of 1970 has this balance been upset in large-scale violence that threatened the regime’s survival. Moreover, in every acute pinch, Jordan has always managed to obtain enough outside aid to stave off economic disaster. The odds are quite good that Jordan will muddle through this and many more springs in much the same way, even without much real reform.
Dr. David Pollock is the director of Fikra Forum and is the Kaufman Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in the Program on Arab Politics.