The Jordanian State Buys Itself Time | Middle East Research and Information Project
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For months prior to Jordan’s parliamentary elections, concluded on January 23, both the state apparatus and the opposition had been building up the contests as a moment of truth. The state presented the polls as a critical juncture in the execution of its strategy of gradual political reform; the opposition, riding the momentum of two years of concerted street protests, staged a boycott it hoped would delegitimize the whole endeavor.
It was probably inevitable the media would present the vote as a horse race — and that race the regime appears to have won handily. The state can point to near record-high turnout as repudiating the opposition’s boycott, and to the reports of election observers who found little, if any fraud as signifying that real political reform is underway. News outlets like the New York Times that had highlighted the regime’s history of broken promises now proclaim its victory. [1] Predictions of imminent collapse, which dominated 2012, have given way to voices hailing the Hashemite Kingdom as one of the “role models for the region” that had “chosen evolution over revolution.” [2]
It certainly seems that the elections have afforded the regime room to breathe. Only two months previously, after all, thousands had taken to the streets all across the kingdom to demand the restoration of fuel subsidies — and some of the demonstrators’ slogans came close to calling for regime change. In the streets of Amman, angry young men chanted “Freedom is from God, in spite of you, ‘Abdallah” and “Down, down with ‘Abdallah.”
