Since the passing of a new electoral law in September, Jordanians have been expecting the announcement of a government change, as the constitution calls for the resignation of the prime minister and cabinet before new elections can take place. Jordan’s King Abdullah II made it official on Sunday by dissolving the parliament and accepting the resignation of Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour and his cabinet. A royal decree then announced Hani Mulki, a veteran diplomat and former cabinet minister, as the new prime minister, effectively playing a caretaker role to guide the country through new elections. According to the constitution, these should take place within four months.
Outgoing Prime Minister Ensour served for four full years — longer than any other prime minister since the accession to the throne of King Abdullah II in 1999. Appointed and dismissed by royal decree, Jordanian prime ministers and governments never tended to last long, but in the first two years of the Arab Spring alone, Jordan had five different prime ministers and governments. When Ensour was appointed as the fifth prime minister during that tumultuous period, many expected him to last just a few months like his predecessors. But after the 2013 elections, the palace made the shift of consulting with parliament over the naming of a new prime minister. In the absence of political parties in parliament, blocs of MPs settled on a compromise candidate who was not himself an MP — the then-current prime minister. Ensour therefore received a second and, as it turned out, lengthy term in office.
Jordan’s political opposition parties and movements harshly criticized previous laws that maintained gerrymandered districts, minimizing urban representation and maximizing rural representation. These laws were created to limit the influence of largely Palestinian Jordanian communities and urban areas that were bases for Islamist representation. Rural areas were generally believed to be bedrock areas of tribal East Jordanian support for the regime.
However, these old identity politics formulas have seemed doubtful at best in the modern era. Most of Jordan’s youth-led popular movements that began to emerge in 2011 — known as the Hirak — were drawn from these supposedly bedrock communities. They were mainly East Bank Jordanian, tribal, from smaller towns and cities, or from rural areas … and they were deeply critical of the regime, its neoliberal development policies, and of corruption in public life.
Unlike many other states in the region, Jordan had no revolution, coup d’état or civil war during the Arab Spring — for which many Jordanians are thankful — but did see a resurgence of activism and protest, especially in 2011 and 2012. Since then, many movements have toned down their own activism in the wake of political violence and turmoil across Jordan’s borders. The regime, meanwhile, initiated a series of top-down reforms meant to defuse tensions within the kingdom.
Today, however, the gap between the regime and its diverse forms of opposition remains quite wide, over not only future trajectories but also what exactly happened during Jordan’s version of the Arab Spring. For many in the regime, Jordan serves as a model of a regime reforming itself, changing laws on parties and elections, revising the constitution and opening up the system carefully and gradually. For its critics and activist opponents, these measures are merely cosmetic, not meaningful shifts in Jordan’s palace-centered power structure. Recent changes to the constitution were regarded with alarm in many quarters of Jordanian politics as solidifying monarchical power, rather than pluralism, separation of powers, or checks and balances.
In some respects, a new set of elections and a new post-election government might test just where Jordan is in this process. The new electoral law reduces parliament from 150 to 130 seats but maintains the practice of special quotas to guarantee nine seats for Christians, three seats for Circassians and Chechens, and 15 seats for women. The new law also met a major opposition demand by eliminating the much maligned one-person one-vote system — that is, the single non-transferable vote (SNTV) system — in which voters had one vote for a district representative. The new law brings back bloc voting in multi-member districts. Jordanian voters will have as many votes as there are MPs in their district. Opposition parties had demanded a return to precisely this type of system, ever since it was eliminated in the 1989 election, in which the opposition fared very well. They also demanded, however, a shift to proportional representation (PR) for national party lists representing half the legislature. The new law does include a PR system, but not quite what opposition parties and movements had in mind, since the law asks voters to choose a candidate list within their district rather than a party list at the national level.
The test then will be whether this electoral system turns out to be more fair, and very crucially, whether the opposition participates or boycotts the elections. After elections, it remains to be seen if the new parliament, for all the electoral changes, actually looks different from the last several — which were routinely ridiculed as tribal assemblies by their many detractors. Will it be diverse and more truly representative of Jordan and its people? Will post-election consultations result in something closer to parliamentary and party-led governments, or is that still a long way away or even a pipe dream?
The change in government and upcoming elections comes at a time when the opposition Islamist movement, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, is in disarray, to say the least. After formally splitting into two versions of the Brotherhood last year, the movement is deeply divided between its hawkish and dovish wings. The larger and in some ways original wing is now unlicensed for the first time since 1946, and the regime has recently moved against it, closing its headquarters in Amman and regional offices in other cities. In contrast, the newly licensed Muslim Brotherhood Society is led by moderate members looking to engage the regime and participate in the political process, including, presumably, the upcoming elections.
New elections will not only take place in the context of a divided opposition and a waning protest movement but also in a time of economic crisis and of severe regional insecurity, when most Jordanians are concerned about corruption, unemployment and rising costs. Jordan’s economic crisis and severe aid dependency have only worsened over time and have been further strained by the influx of hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees. Regional insecurity have also steadily deteriorated, with Israeli-Palestinian tensions to the west, the Syrian civil war to the north and Iraq’s unrest and insurgency to the east. In addition, the Jordanian regime sees the Islamic State as a serious, even existential, threat and is very much on a war footing, with reinforced borders, extensive U.S. military presence in the kingdom and fears of jihadist activism.
In this chaotic context, Jordan’s new prime minister is now charged with forming a new cabinet, carrying out the electoral process and convincing both potential candidates and voters that this process is real and meaningful and worthy of participation.
After four years with the same prime minister, and almost four years with the recent parliament, Jordanians are once again looking at a new prime minister, a new government, a new electoral law — and soon — new elections. The question, of course, is whether all these changes together produce a truly new outcome, or instead one that looks very familiar.
Curtis Ryan is a professor of political science at Appalachian State University in North Carolina.