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Italy

Renzi, Berlusconi team up for electoral law pact

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Italian politics just got a lot more complicated.Italy Flag Icon

Over the weekend, former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, the leader of Italy’s largest center-right party, Forza Italia, and Matteo Renzi, the leader of Italy’s largest center-left party, the Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party), joined forces (pictured above) to introduce the blueprint for a new electoral law.

Notably, the deal didn’t include input from prime minister Enrico Letta, a moderate who leads a fragile ‘grand coalition’ government that includes not just his own Democratic Party, but centrists close to former technocratic prime minister Mario Monti and one of Italy’s two main center-right blocs, the Nuovo Centrodestra (NCD, the ‘New Center-Right’), led by deputy prime minister and interior minister Angelino Alfano.  The Alfano bloc split two months ago from Berlusconi’s newly rechristened Forza Italia, which pulled its support from the Letta government at the same time.

The deal is a political masterstroke by Renzi because it makes him appear to have stolen the initiative from Italy’s prime minister.  Letta formed a government in May 2013 with the two priority goals of passing a new election law and deeper economic reforms.  Despite a ruling in December 2013 that Italy’s current elections law is unconstitutional, Letta’s government has not yet put forward an alternative acceptable to the three main groups in the coalition.  So the Renzi-Berlusconi deal is now the only concrete proposal — it backs up the talk that Renzi, the 39-year-old Florence mayor, will be a man of action in Italian politics.  Renzi won the party’s leadership in a contest in November 2013 over token opposition.  Renzi is neither a minister in Letta’s cabinet nor a member of the Italian parliament, and he’s been more of a critic of the current government than a supporter of a prime minister who until recently was the deputy leader of Renzi’s own party.

By way of background (those familiar can skip the following three paragraphs):

Italy has gone through a few different electoral systems, but most of them have featured either closed-list or only partially open-list proportional representation.  Reforms in 1991 and 1993 transformed the previous system in what’s informally been called Italy’s first republic, which spanned the postwar period until the collapse of the dominant Democrazia Cristiana (DC, Christian Democracy) in a series of bribery and corruption scandals collectively known as Tangentopoli (‘Bribesville’).  But the current system dates to 2005, when Berlusconi ushered in a new law that everyone (including Roberto Calderoli, who introduced the 2005 legislation) now agrees is awful and which Italy’s Corte costituzionale has now invalidated.

The current law, which governed Italy’s elections in 2006, 2008 and 2013, provides for a national proportional representation system to determine the 630 members of the lower house, the Camera die Deputati (Chamber of Deputies).  The party (or coalition) that wins the greatest number of votes nationwide wins a ‘bonus’ that gives it control of 55% of the lower house’s seats, not unlike the Greek electoral system.  But the 315 members of the upper house, the Senato (Senate), are determined on a regional PR basis — the top party/coalition in each of Italy’s 20 regions wins 55% of the region’s seats.  That means, however, that one party/coalition can hold a majority in the lower house, but wield much less than a majority in the upper house.

That’s the exact situation in which Italy found itself after the February 2013 elections, when the Democratic Party and its allies in the centrosinistra (center-left) coalition narrowly edged out Berlusconi’s centrodestra (center-right) coalition.  Beppe Grillo’s protest Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, the Five Star Movement) followed closely behind in third place.  It meant that while the Italian left controlled the Chamber of Deputies, it couldn’t muster a majority in the Senate.  After a three-month political crisis that ended with the inability to elect a new Italian president (Italy’s parliament ultimately decided to reelect the 88-year-old Giorgio Napolitano to an unprecedented second seven-year term), the Democratic Party’s leader Pier Luigi Bersani resigned, and Napolitano invited Letta to form Italy’s current government.

The Renzi-Berlusconi deal sketches out an electoral reform on roughly the following lines:

  • The Chamber of Deputies would become, by far, the predominant chamber of Italian lawmaking.  The Senate would hold fewer powers as a region-based chamber.  Italy’s national government would also consolidate more powers away from Italy’s regions.
  • Deputies would be elected, as they are now, on the basis of national, closed-list proportional representation, which concentrates power in the hands of party leaders and elites (as opposed to open-list, which would allow voters to choose the members that represent them in parliament).  An alternative might be something akin to the proportional aspect of the Spanish electoral system — in Italy, it would mean a proportional system divided into 118 constituencies, each of which elects four or five deputies.
  • If a party/coalition wins over 35% of the vote, it will still yield a ‘majority bonus’ of either 53% or 54% of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies.  If no party/coalition wins over 35%,  the top two parties/coalitions will hold a runoff to determine who wins the majority bonus.
  • Italy would introduce a threshold for parties in order to reduce the fragmentation of Italy’s politics — a party running outside a coalition would need to win 8% of the vote and a party running inside a coalition would need to win 4% or 5% of the vote running outside a coalition (though the thresholds would be much lower in a multi-district ‘semi-Spanish’ system).
  • The deal would not replicate the French system, which elects legislators to single-member districts in a two-round election, and which has been discussed often as an alternative for Italy.

The details are not so important at this stage, because they could change as the Renzi-Berlusconi deal begins the long process of turning into legislation.  But if Renzi can pull the majority of the Democratic Party along, and if Berlusconi’s Forza Italia supports the deal, the two groups could steamroll Italy’s smaller parties, even in the Senate.  If Alfano and his bloc joins, the deal would be unstoppable.  Renzi has already won a majority of the party’s executive committee (a promising first sign), and Alfano has indicated that he’s open to the reform (though less excited about closed lists).

But there are all sorts of fallout effects — politically, legally and electorally — to contemplate over the coming days and weeks. Continue reading Renzi, Berlusconi team up for electoral law pact →

Chile

Chilean parliamentary and presidential (first round) election results

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Chile’s general elections on Sunday went just about as much as expected. chile

Michelle Bachelet leads all over candidates by a margin of over 20%, but with just 46.68% support, she’ll narrowly miss the absolute majority that she needs to avoid a December 15 runoff.  Bachelet, who served as Chile’s president between 2006 and 2010, is the candidate of the Nueva Mayoria (New Majority) coalition, which is itself based on the broad center-left Concertación that’s won four out of the five past elections since the return of regular democracy in Chile in the late 1980s after the regime of Augusto Pinochet.

In second place, also as widely expected, is Evelyn Matthei with 25.01% — Matthei is a former senator and a former minister of labor in the administration of outgoing center-right president Sebastián Piñera, who is the candidate of the broad center-right coalition that’s comprised of Piñera’s Renovación Nacional (RN, National Renewal) and Matthei’s more conservative Unión Demócrata Independiente (UDI, Independent Democratic Union).

But given how close Bachelet came to winning an outright majority, she is almost assured of victory against Matthei in the second round — so the next four weeks of campaigning will likely amount to somewhat of a victory lap for Bachelet, who hopes to become the first former Chilean president to return for a second, non-consecutive term in recent history.

It’s been a difficult year for Chilean conservatives — its center-right coalition, the Coalición por el Cambio (Coalition for Change),  widely known as the Alianza por Chile (Alliance for Chile), which saw its frontrunner for president, former energy minister Laurence Golborne withdraw from the race in the spring due to accusations of malfeasance stemming from his time in the private sector, and which saw its elected presidential nominee, former economy minister Pablo Longueira, withdraw promptly after winning the hard-fought nomination on account of clinical depression.

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Surprisingly far behind in third place were two relatively independent candidates.

Marco Enríquez-Ominami (popularly known as ‘MEO’), ran a stridently leftist campaign as the founder and leader of the Partido Progresista (Progressive Party), and he hoped to improve on his performance in the December 2009 first-round presidential election, when he won 20% of the vote.  Instead, he won just 10.96% of the vote, a disappointment for Enríquez-Ominami’s feisty campaign and the sign that the broad center-left electorate largely coalesced around Bachelet’s candidacy.

Perhaps even more disappointing was the performance of Franco Parisi, who won just 10.12% of the vote — an independent center-right candidate, Parisi was vying for second place in polls with Matthei a month ago before Matthei started attacking Parisi, a popular professor and economist, especially with regard to allegations that he withheld $200,000 of employee wages.

While Bachelet may have enjoyed winning the presidency outright, more important to her and the Nueva Mayoria coalition are the results of the parliamentary elections also held on Sunday — Chileans were electing all 120 members of the Cámara de Diputados (Chamber of Deputies), the lower house of Chile’s parliament, and a little over one-half of the 38-member Senado (Senate), the upper house.

With just over 95% of the vote counted for the Chamber of Deputies, the center-left Nueva Mayoria held 65 seats, the center-right Alianza held 47 seats, with four seats still undecided, and with one seat going to the Progressive Party and three seats going to independents, leaving Bachelet and the center-left on the cusp of winning the 69 seats necessary for a four-sevenths majority in the lower house, which is necessary to enact the kind of major educational and tax reforms that Bachelet hopes to pass in the next four years, but not the two-thirds majority necessary for constitutional revisions. Under Chile’s ‘binomial’ system, however, in which two deputies are elected from each of 60 districts, it’s difficult to achieve a lopsided victory in either direction in either house of parliament.

In the Senate, of the 20 seats up for election, the Nueva Mayoria has won 12, the Alianza just six, with one independent and one still to be determined.  Given that the other 18 Senate seats divided between nine for the center-left and nine for the center-right in the previous December 2009 election, that would give Nueva Mayoria at least 21 seats in the Senate and the Alianza 15 — enough for a clear majority, but again just on the cusp of winning a four-sevenths majority (22) in the upper house as well.

As Duke University professor Ariel Dorfman wrote in The Guardian over the weekend, the two were once childhood playmates when their fathers both served in the Chilean air force — Matthei’s father supported Pinochet in the September 1973 coup against president Salvador Allende, while Bachelet’s father opposed the coup and was subsequently imprisoned, tortured and died in prison in 1974:

Fernando Matthei was a military attache at the London embassy when the coup led by Augusto Pinochet destroyed Chilean democracy. He could do nothing to help the friend with whom he used to exchange classical records and talk into the night about sports, politics and literature. But his failure to act could no longer be justified, however, when he returned to Santiago at the end of 1973 and was named director of the aviation’s War Academy – the very building in which Alberto Bachelet was to die two months later. Though several judicial reviews and trials found that then Colonel Matthei had no penal culpability in the death of General Alberto Bachelet – the cellars where his comrade-in-arms were being tormented were off limits to anyone not working as an interrogator – the guilt still haunts him. In his 2009 book, he admitted: “Prudence outweighed courage.”

Not even the most delirious novelist could have imagined a more unusual history of differing destinies. One dies because he had the courage, though perhaps not the prudence, of accepting to head the distribution and food centre of Allende’s government, a post that had ministerial status. The other lives a life of excessive prudence and no courage and is ultimately named to the ruling junta. General Matthei also served as health minister in Pinochet’s cabinet – a portfolio that Michelle Bachelet held a generation later. As for Evelyn Matthei, she was a senator and then labour minister in Piñera’s government. A study in contrasts: the socialist who became Chile’s president and the conservative who aspires to that presidency.

Bachelet and her family sought exile in Australia and East Germany, and Bachelet returned to Chile only in 1979 as a pediatrician.

Third-place candidate Enríquez-Ominami’s father, a revolutionary leftist who also opposed the coup, was also executed by the Pinochet regime, and the effect demonstrates just how much the ghosts of 1973 (and the ghosts of the Pinochet regime, which governed until 1989) haunt contemporary Chilean politics.

Continue reading Chilean parliamentary and presidential (first round) election results →

Chile

Bachelet’s ambitious agenda to be determined by result of Chile’s parliamentary elections

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No matter who wins tomorrow’s presidential election in Chile — and by what margin — we will know much more about the nature of the Chilean government over the next four years from the result of the other elections that will be held.chile

Those are the parliamentary elections, in which Chileans will elect all 120 members of the Cámara de Diputados (Chamber of Deputies), the lower house of Chile’s parliament, and half of the 38-member Senado (Senate), the upper house.

The inability of current president Sebastián Piñera to win absolute majorities in the Chilean parliament in the previous December 2009 elections constrained his legislative ability over the past four years to enact the kind of market liberalization or other reforms that Piñera might otherwise have pursued.

Likewise, though former president Michelle Bachelet is the overwhelming favorite to return to La Moneda, the Chilean presidential palace, the extent to which her administration will be able to enact campaign promises depends in large part on her ability to win a parliamentary majority for the broad left coalition that she leads, Nueva Mayoria (New Majority), which is essentially a rebranding of the broad center-left coalition of Chilean parties, the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia (Concert of Parties for Democracy) — with the recent addition of the Partido Comunista (Community Party) and a couple of other minor parties.

Though it seems likely that Bachelet’s coalition will win a majority in both houses, no one knows how large their margin will be — and, of course, with the widening of the previous Concertación to include the Communists and other far-left groups, maintaining unity within Bachelet’s coalition will be even harder in the years ahead.  That’s especially true in light of the lofty platform that Bachelet has outlined during her campaign —  Bachelet hopes to achieve major tax reform (an increase in the corporate tax rate from 20% to 25% and a cut in the maximum income tax rate from 40% to 35%), education reform (free access to university within the next six years) and, most ambitiously, a new Chilean constitution.  Constitutional changes require a two-thirds majority in both houses, an outcome that’s extremely unlikely, and even large-scale reforms, such as the kind Bachelet hopes to enact for Chilean education, require a four-sevenths majority.

That, in turn, is due to Chile’s electoral system, which is designed to avoid large majorities in either direction.  In respect of the Chamber of Deputies, Chileans vote in 60 constituencies that elect two members each — Chile’s unique binomial system that Pinochet’s advisers stitched into Chile’s current constitution before ceding power to civilian leadership in 1989.  While each coalition can run two candidate in each district, the typical result is that each major coalition each wins one seat in each constituency — one coalition will only be awarded both seats if it defeats the second coalition by a two-to-one margin.  A similar system exists for the Senate — Chileans elect two senators in each of 19 senatorial districts.

Moreover, Bachelet faces a new challenge from the Partido Progresista (Progressive Party of Chile), the party created two years ago by Marco  Enríquez-Ominami, who won about 20% as an independent candidate in the previous 2009 presidential election and who is running again in this weekend’s presidential election.  Although no one predicts that the Progressive Party is likely to steal many seats in the parliamentary vote, even one or two seats in each chamber could significantly alter Bachelet’s ability to govern.  Continue reading Bachelet’s ambitious agenda to be determined by result of Chile’s parliamentary elections →

Czech Republic

Sobotka turns to forming government after troubling internal ČSSD revolt

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Normally, party leaders face the boot when they lose elections, not after they win them.czech

But that’s what happened in the Czech Republic, when the center-left Česká strana sociálně demokratická (ČSSD, Czech Social Democratic Party) narrowly topped the country’s parliamentary elections in late October with just over 20% of the vote.

Though the Social Democrats won the election, they took just 50 out of 200 seats in the Poslanecká sněmovna (the Chamber of Deputies), the lower house of the Czech parliament, and only nearly edged out a new populist, anti-corruption, business-friendly party, the Akce nespokojených občanů (ANO, Action of Dissatisfied Citizens), founded just two years ago by wealth businessman Andrej Babiš.

That left the leader of the Social Democrats, Bohuslav Sobotka, in a difficult position.  The fractured result means that the Social Democrats will have to find at least another 50 deputies in order to govern — and despite the willingness of the Social Democrats to work alongside the Komunistická strana Čech a Moravy (KSČM, Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia) for the first time in the post-Soviet era, the 33 seats that the Communists won won’t alone be enough to float a Social Democrat-led government.

But what left his leadership truly in question was a split between two wings of his party, a pro-Sobotka wing that hopes to keep its distance from the Czech Republic’s new president, Miloš Zeman, and a pro-Zeman wing that seeks closer collaboration between the two.  Zeman led the Social Democrats over a decade ago, and he served as Czech prime minister from 1998 to 2002.  A falling-out with the ČSSD leadership in the mid-2000s, however, caused Zeman to quit the Social Democrats and form a new party.

Zeman triumphed in his own right in the January 2013 presidential election — the first such direct election in Czech politics — and has spent the greater part of the year trying to muscle even more power for the Czech presidency at the expense of the parliamentary government.

So almost immediately following the election, Zeman (pictured above, left, with Sobotka) and top members of the pro-Zeman wing of the Social Democrats, including the party’s deputy leader Michal Hašek, held a secret meeting.  That preceded a call for Sobotka to step down as leader on the basis that Sobotka’s personalized, centralized campaign led to a poorer-than-expected result.

The ‘coup’ soon fell apart, though — Hašek and other participants in the secret meeting with Zeman lied about it, Sobotka rallied his supporters  against Zeman’s interference in internal party affairs, Czech overwhelming blamed Hašek for causing political instability and so, for now, Sobotka remains leader and Hašek has stepped down as deputy chair.

Sobotka won a battle, but it’s far from clear that he’ll even be the next prime minister.  Continue reading Sobotka turns to forming government after troubling internal ČSSD revolt →

Czech Republic

Czech election results: a fractured and uncertain Chamber of Deputies

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In September, voters in some of Europe’s most economically stable countries (Germany, Austria and even Norway) happily turned out to support their incumbent governments.  But in October, the Czech Republic’s election demonstrates that most of Europe remains under incredible social, economic and political stress.czech

Czech voters selected members to the lower house of the Czech parliament between two days of voting on Friday and today.  The result is a fragmented mess — it’s the most fractured election result since the May 2012 Greek parliamentary election, which resulted in a hung parliament and necessitated a second set of elections in Greece just a month later.

Here are the results:

czech 2013

Seven different parties — ranging from free-market liberals to communists to political neophytes — won enough votes to gain seats in the 200-member Poslanecká sněmovna (the Chamber of Deputies), but it’s not clear who will be able to form a government.  Voters clearly rejected the previous center-right government’s approach to austerity and budget discipline, but split over what they want to replace it.  Turnout fell below 60% for the first time in over a decade.

In purely political terms, the result gives even more power to Czech president Miloš Zeman (pictured above), who came to office after winning the country’s first direct presidential election in January.  On the list of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in this weekend’s election, perhaps no one is a greater winner than Zeman, who is entitled to appoint the prime minister and therefore, will shape the first steps in the coalition negotiations.

Since taking office, Zeman has pushed to empower the Czech presidency at the expense of the Czech parliament.  After the country’s center-right government fell earlier this summer, Zeman appointed Jiří Rusnok as his hand-picked technocratic prime minister, but Rusnok’s (and Zeman’s) inability to win a vote of confidence led to this weekend’s snap elections.  Rusnok has served as a caretaker prime minister for the past three months, and he could wind up serving quite a while longer if no governing coalition can be formed.

The center-left Česká strana sociálně demokratická (ČSSD, Czech Social Democratic Party) technically won the election — but just barely, and with far less support than polls showed just a month ago.  Despite winning more votes than any other party, the Social Democrats won just one out of every five votes, and it’s the party’s worst result in two decades.  It’s not necessarily clear that the party’s leader, former finance minister Bohuslav Sobotka, will even have the chance to form a government.  There’s simply no credible case that the Social Democrats have a mandate for much of anything.

Though Zeman, a Social Democratic prime minister between 1998 and 2002, broke away from the Social Democrats only in 2007, the party remains divided over the extent to which it wants to associate with Zeman now that he holds the Czech presidency.  What’s certain is that the poor result will weaken Sobotka, who leads the anti-Zeman wing of the party.  That means Zeman could bypass Sobotka and appoint a friendlier Social Democrat as prime minister, such as deputy leader Michal Hašek or perhaps Jan Mládek, who was widely tipped to become the next finance minister.

The real winner in today’s election is the Akce nespokojených občanů (ANO, Action of Dissatisfied Citizens), founded in 2011 by millionaire Andrej Babiš, which nearly overtook the Social Democrats in terms of support — they will hold just three fewer seats than the Social Democrats in the new Chamber of Deputies.  Babiš is one of the wealthiest businessmen in the Czech Republic, and he’s led a ‘pox-on-all-your-houses’ campaign that rejects the mainstream Czech political elite as corrupt and dishonest.  Babiš owns founded Agrofert, originally a food processing and agricultural company, but now a conglomerate that’s the fourth-largest business in the Czech Republic.  Though his platform is relatively nebulous, he’s called for reforms to reduce corruption and end immunity for politicians from prosecution.

Think of Babiš as a cross between former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and Georgian prime minister Bidzina Ivanishvili, perhaps, and think of ANO as a more business-friendly version of Beppe Grillo’s Italian protest group, the Five Star Movement.  Given Babiš’s recent effort to buy a top Czech media company, the comparisons to Berlusconi have become particularly sharp:

A Czech tabloid recently nicknamed Andrej Babis, the new star on the Czech political scene, “Babisconi.” But, when compared with Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, he quips: “I have no interest whatsoever in underaged girls.”

In third place is the Komunistická strana Čech a Moravy (KSČM, Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia), which won about 15% of the vote, the party’s second-best result since the fall of the Soviet Union.  The party is the heir to the old Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, which governed the country from 1968 until 1990 as a Soviet-aligned, one-party state.  Though the Communists have moderated their approach somewhat in the 21st century, and though they were expected to participate in a Social Democratic-led government, the party remains unapologetically communist (unlike other former eastern far-left parties, such as Die Linke in Germany, which espouse a more moderate form of democratic socialism).  Given that the base of the Czech Communists was once older, rural voters, its comeback today says much about the economic despair in the Czech Republic these days.    Continue reading Czech election results: a fractured and uncertain Chamber of Deputies →

Czech Republic

New Czech party hopes to ride anti-corruption momentum to election gains

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Wallenstein view

It’s been a tumultuous year in Czech politics — a surveillance scandal involving the prime minister’s love triangle brought down the government, a power-hungry president elected in the first direct presidential election earlier this year is working to claw power away from the parliament, and what’s left of the Czech right boils down to a contest between an eccentric Bohemian aristocrat and a multi-millionaire entrepreneur. czech

Though it sounds like the long-lost plot of a Leoš Janáček opera, it’s the backdrop to this weekend’s parliamentary elections, which should be no less dramatic than the events that shaped them.

What was once expected to be an easy victory for the country’s main center-left party, the Česká strana sociálně demokratická (ČSSD, Czech Social Democratic Party) now looks it will be a less dominant victory — so much that the Social Democrats are no longer considered a lock to lead the next Czech government.  It’s the latest twist in a series of turns that could have major consequences for the economic and political development of the Czech Republic (or ‘Czechia‘ as its current president wants to call it) and its 10.5 million residents, to say nothing of the future expansion of the eurozone within central and eastern Europe. Continue reading New Czech party hopes to ride anti-corruption momentum to election gains →

Jordan

What comes next for Jordan after loyalists win rigged, boycotted elections

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abdullahs

The Jordan Times actually has a non-ironic headline for a story that reads: ‘Jordan biggest winner in elections — King.’jordan flag icon

I mistook it initially as reading that Jordan’s king was the biggest winner in the Jordanian elections, which would have probably been a more accurate headline, given that last week’s elections were certainly a ‘win’ in the nominal sense for Abdullah II, the Jordan monarch since 1999 (pictured above, right, with Saudi Arabian king Abdullah).

Those elections, held last Wednesday, January 23, were all but certain to elect to the Majlis al-Nuwaab (Chamber of Deputies), the lower house of Jordan’s Majlis al-Umma (National Assembly) a majority of legislators loyal to the monarchy — the 60 senators of the upper house, the Majlis al-Aayan (Assembly of Senators) are appointed by Jordan’s king.

Following the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’ protests in Jordan, Abdullah agreed to allow the Chamber of Deputies to select the next cabinet and prime minister.  Those deputies, however, include 108 out of 150 who were elected as ‘independents,’ mostly loyal to the monarchy, with just 15 seats reserved exclusively for women and just 27 reserved to be contested by political parties.

In light of the fact that 72% of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies are essentially rigged in favor of the monarchy, it’s understandable that the political wing of Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic Action Front (جبهة العمل الإسلامي), boycotted the elections, alongside several other smaller parties, including many representatives of Hirak, the secular protest movement founded two years ago to protest the Jordanian monarchy.  The Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan has a longtime history of greater cooperation with the ruling state, and it itself is less conservative than other similar movements in the Middle East — it’s relatively progressive on women’s rights and is committed to democracy, for example.

Given the fact that the Brotherhood’s voters are typically more urban and more Palestinian, the elections will have resulted in disproportionately greater representation for the rural tribal population and the so-called East Bank Jordanians, who were never resident in the Palestinian-dominated West Bank of the Jordan River, annexed by Israel after the Six-Day War in 1967.

But the result is a bit more complicated than that.

International observers, such as the National Democratic Institute, have reported that the elections, by and large, were the freest elections yet experienced in Jordan, where 56% of eligible voters ignored the call to boycott and turned out to vote.  Given the turmoil currently engulfing Egypt under Muslim Brotherhood-supported president Mohammed Morsi, it’s not surprising that many Jordanians would be wary about turning over power to the Brotherhood in their own country.

Despite the Brotherhood boycott, however, 18 even more moderate Islamist candidates won seats, and another 20 or so leftist, nationalist or other government critics also won seats, a contrast to the prior Chamber of Deputies.

But if the vote wasn’t entirely lacking in irregularities, it’s hard to argue that the elections were exactly fair, given that the largest opposition party will have no representation.

So it’s also not surprising that many Jordanians are now protesting (some reports describe rioting) in the aftermath of the elections:

Jordan is witnessing its third day of riots protesting against the outcomes of the parliamentary elections, which showed a victory for tribal forces. These riots have deepened the political crisis that the country has been going through since January 2011. Scenes of violence killed one and injured three in the eastern tribal city of Mafraq, and eclipsed governmental and Western reports, which confirmed the integrity of the voting process. This comes at a time when Jordanian King Abdullah II is considering his options regarding the formation of a new government.

At the same time, the Muslim Brotherhood cancelled its own planned protests, so it’s too soon to know if the post-election protests will reach the critical mass that would more imminently pressure the Hashemite monarchy to accelerate its reform efforts.

Caretaker prime minister Abdullah Ensour, who was appointed in October 2012 to oversee economic reforms, has stepped down, but will stay on pending the appointment of a new prime minister directly by the National Assembly.  Jordanians most recently gathered for large-scale protests in November 2012 over cuts in fuel subsidies, one of several steps that Abdullah’s government has taken in light of a budget deficit that reached 6.5% of Jordanian GDP in 2012.

So what comes next? Continue reading What comes next for Jordan after loyalists win rigged, boycotted elections →

Jordan

Muslim Brotherhood boycott highlights Jordanian elections

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King Abdullah II

Sheikh Hammam Said

Jordan goes to the polls in the second election in as many days in the Middle East. But unlike Israel’s topsy-turvy free-for-all, don’t expect much change as a result of today’s Jordanian parliamentary elections.jordan flag icon

The salient feature of today’s election is that the Muslim Brotherhood isn’t participating — many of the parliamentary seats will be won by ‘independents’ who support Jordan’s monarchy.

Though it didn’t threaten to topple Jordan’s monarch like it did the governments of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, the Arab Spring nonetheless visited the country in February 2011 in the form of protests for more representative government and, more recently, riots in November 2012 following cuts in fuel subsidies last year.

Budget austerity has come even to the Hashemite Kingdom, where times are tough, economically speaking — the country, which lacks the rich mineral and oil wealth of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates, is notching some of the lowest GDP growth in a decade and its budget deficit rose in 2012 to 6.5% of GDP.

Within Jordan’s bicameral Majlis al-Umma (National Assembly), the Majlis al-Nuwaab (Chamber of Deputies), newly expanded to 150 members, are elected in single-seat constituencies, and those 150 deputies are who will be elected in Wednesday’s vote.  The upper house, Majlis al-Aayan (Assembly of Senators), remains more powerful and is comprised of 60 senators, all of whom are appointed by Jordan’s king.

Much of the Jordanian government’s power resides in the Hashemite monarchy, headed since 1999 by Abdullah II (pictured above, top).  The king holds the executive power to sign, implement (or veto) Jordanian laws, may suspend or dissolve parliament, appoints (and dismisses) all judges, retains all military power and the ability to set foreign policy.

In recent years, Abdullah has attempted to open, however slightly, the governing process.  For example, after the 2011 protests, Abdullah agreed to an elected cabinet determined by the Chamber of Deputies — the idea is that the Chamber of Deputies, and not Abdullah, will choose the next prime minister, even if the deputies themselves are pro-government.  Although most of the seats (108) are eligible to be contested only by ‘independents,’ 15 additional seats are reserved for women, and just 27 seats are eligible to be contested by political parties on the basis of a national proportional representation vote.

Despite the reforms, the Muslim Brotherhood has demanded that at least 50% of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies be determined by party list, so the relatively narrow opportunity to compete is high on its list of rationales for boycotting the election.

The Muslim Brotherhood created a Jordanian political party in 1992, the Islamic Action Front (جبهة العمل الإسلامي), which is relatively more liberal than most Islamist parties throughout the Arab world (for example, it’s pro-democracy).

Although it won 20 out of 84 eligible seats in the June 2003 parliamentary elections, it won just six seats in the subsequent November 2007 elections, and it boycotted the 2010 elections.

Other smaller parties, including Jordanian communists and Arab nationalists, are also boycotting Wednesday’s parliamentary vote.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s leader, Sheikh Hammam Said (pictured above, bottom) has argued that the 2011 reforms don’t go far enough — in addition to the 27-seat limit, he has called for an end to corruption practiced by the various governments appointed in the past by the monarchy.

The boycott by Jordan’s largest opposition force, however, threatens to undermine the legitimacy of the elections.

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