AMMAN, 17 November 2007 — The campaign for Jordan’s parliamentary elections peaked yesterday, the last weekend before the polling day on Tuesday, as King Abdallah issued strict directives to the government to ensure fairness of the ballot process.
During a visit to the Prime Ministry, the monarch reaffirmed the government’s “commitment to ensure that the polls are conducted in an atmosphere of freedom, fairness and transparency,” according to a royal court statement.
“These elections should reflect our vision to bolster democracy and produce a Parliament capable of dealing with all challenges in the forthcoming stage,” he said.
The king made the remarks as main streets, public gathering areas, road tunnels, even hospitals and schools turned into billboards with flashy posters of smiling candidates and slogans worded to grab attention and support.
About 950 candidates, including 201 women, are competing for the lower house of Parliament’s 110 seats. The Islamic Action Front (IAF), the only organized political party in terms of internationally observed standards, is fielding 22 candidates, a figure that has been considered too low by the party’s rank and file.
A handful of small pan-Arab and left-leaning parties are teeming up to form a unified list, which observers believe have a weak chance to return deputies. Most of other candidates are running as independents that count on tribal and factional affiliations to garner support.
The campaign is marred by a controversy between the government and the Islamic-led opposition over the role that can be played by the country’s civil society bodies to ensure fairness of the ballot process. Prime Minister Marouf Bakheet has invited the civil society organizations to “follow up and monitor” the voting process, but said the nongovernmental bodies would not be allowed to play a “supervisory role” that involved presence of their personnel at the polling centers.
In response, the Jordanian Coalition for Civil Society Organizations has announced last week that it would drop a plan to monitor parliamentary elections, citing “crippling” government restrictions.
“How do you expect us to report on the credibility of elections when civil groups are not permitted to observe vote casting and ballot counting,” asked Samih Sunukrut, secretary-general of the Arab Organization for Human Rights, one of the coalition’s 15 members.
The IAF, the political arm of the influential Muslim Brotherhood movement, accused the government of being lenient in dealing with vote buying and stopping short of taking all measures necessary for ensuring the polls fairness.
“The government needs to give assurance to the public that this year’s elections will be held in a transparent manner. We hope it reconsiders its decision to limit the access of NGOs to polling stations and grant them all facilities, otherwise it will face difficulty in defending the credibility of the polls,” the IAF Deputy Secretary-General Ryayyel Gharaibeh said.
The IAF is running the elections on the basis of a slogan “Islam is the solution” for all the country’s problems.
However, observers believe that Islamists are not expected to win more than the 17 seats they grabbed in the previous elections, given the retreating support for their Palestinian ally, Hamas, the image of which has been extremely distorted in the wake of its takeover of the Gaza Strip in mid-June.
