There is an English saying that goes like this: "When God wants to punish someone, He answers their prayers!" This is how some Jordanians viewed King Abdallah II's decree last week, which dissolved Parliament and ordered the government to hold early general elections under a new law.
On the surface the firing of deputies was a popular move, received by multitudes of Jordanians, especially pundits, with glee and satisfaction. The 15th Lower House, elected in 2007 amid allegations of widespread vote rigging, was the target of scathing criticisms by the press and public alike. Overall it was a docile legislature, made up mainly of loyal tribal and independent figures, although the government of Nader Al-Dhahabi failed recently to pass a number of important laws, including one on the kingdom’s social security structures and another on income tax.
The Lower House was getting ready to start its ordinary session this month when the king sent 110 deputies packing two years before the end of their term. It was an unexpected move, but such royal privileges need no justification. Some analysts suggested that the king acknowledged public frustration with the performance of deputies and decided that the coming phase in Jordan’s political and economic life will be better served by a new Parliament elected under a new election law.
But it was not the royal call for early elections that suddenly animated an otherwise stiff political body. Rather it was the king’s instruction to the government to write a new election law. The royal directive gave no hints, other than the instruction that the next elections should be a model of transparency, justice and honesty, but in reaction speculations were abound about the possibility of scrapping the single vote system, in use since 1993.
The single-vote election law had been criticized by the Islamists and other opposition parties and groups as a weapon to curtail their presence in the Lower House. If indeed that was the intention it worked beautifully. The Islamists, the country’s largest opposition, had been losing seats in every election since 1993. In the 2003 elections they managed to win 17 seats, still a considerable figure, but in 2007 only six of their 22 candidates were victorious.
But in addition to containing the Islamists, the single vote had virtually decimated the country’s budding political parties. As such all attempts to revive political pluralism in Jordan, whether genuine or decorative, were doomed. The questionable integrity of the 2007 polls had dealt a heavy blow to Jordan’s once promising democratic transition, launched in the late 1980s. It is ironic that the 15th Parliament, the most submissive of all recent ones, had to be dissolved ostensibly because it was also inept!
It is not clear yet how the government will confront the election law dilemma. If it needs a sturdy reference it has a rock-solid one sitting on the shelf. In 2006 the Royal Committee on the National Agenda submitted a proposal for a modern, all- inclusive, mixed election system that gave voters two votes, one to an individual candidate and a second to a list, a party or a bloc. It also called for a fairer way of designating districts, including a suggestion to make the whole country one electoral district.
None of the committee’s specific recommendations on reforming the election law were adopted. In fact the committee’s voluminous report on political, social, developmental and economic strategies for Jordan in the coming ten years were ignored by successive governments and viewed with suspicion by Parliament.
But the king, in a message to his subjects on the occasion of Eid Al-Adha, spoke clearly of his determination to continue the process of reform, modernization and development whose positive results will be felt in political, economic, social and administrative spheres. The emphasis on reform has been a recurring subject for the king ever since he took over in 1999 after the death of his father King Hussein.
But there is a common perception that political reforms were eventually sacrificed for the sake of more pressing security and economic concerns, especially after the bloody attacks by Al-Qaeda in Amman in 2006. As such a state of political paralysis permeated leading up to the now notorious 2007 elections. But in 2007 the world was relishing a widespread boom. Hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign investments were pouring into Jordan, and for a while the economic promise of a windfall for every citizen justified putting off any bonafide intervention to stop the political life of the country from slipping into a deep coma.
All that had changed and the specter of economic hardship is looming large. The government is battling a record budget deficit, which climbed to more than $1.3 billion during the first 10 months of this year. The real estate sector has been hit hard and public spending has slammed into a concrete wall, while foreign aid and expat remittances have dried up.
As a result, the 2010 budget will be crucial for Jordanians. It is not yet clear how the government will be able to ward off mounting fiscal and economic challenges while sustaining social responsibilities in a country where poverty rates, along with population growth, are exceptionally high.
Some voices have been vocal in calling for a total review of past policies led by economic liberals, which had focused on privatizing public assets and reducing government involvement in public services. There are those who accuse previous governments of squandering billions of dinars, generated from privatization, on failed projects and maintaining a big, mostly inefficient, bureaucracy.
The snap elections will jump-start an idle economy but only for a short period. If genuine political reforms are missed the fundamental challenges will remain and may even multiple. On the other hand, real political reforms will have to take into consideration a myriad of complex Jordan-centric issues such as fair representation for all Jordanians, including those of Palestinian origin, a curtailment of tribal influence on civil society, a more dominant role by the Islamists and a more equitable socioeconomic system. More important, it will have to confront empirical issues about the evolving relationship between the institutions of the monarchy, the government, the deputies and the Jordanian people.
