In search of relevance

Our thirty something (number, not age) political parties are angry with the government. They are vowing that they would not meet with the prime minister even if he asked them to. They think that such meetings are useless. Obviously, the prime minister has similar sentiments.

Why are they angry? Maybe it is because the PM met with the professional unions, and not them, to discuss the election law. That is not what they say. They wrote a letter to the king, saying that the government and the parliament are not to be trusted with legislation meant to promote public freedoms and public participation. They specifically cited the press and publications law and the political parties’ law. As usual, the IAF joined the statement, even though their deputies voted to allow jailing for press crimes, and conveniently decided to walk out of the session (on an unrelated issue) where the number of required founding members for political parties was raised from 50 to 500. Talk about speaking out of both sides of your mouth. They want the king to impose democracy by decree, with no sense of the irony that such a demand entails.

Anyway, the political parties seem to be worried about the stipulation that they need to raise their membership in order to stay licensed. While the deputies seem to have had their self interest in mind, the consolidation of these parties may ultimately be a healthy development, as Nahid Hattar suggests. This remains to be seen. The more immediate impact is that few of the existing parties will survive this change.

As a matter of principle, I see no problem with only one person setting up a political party. If it proves to be appealing, it will grow. If not, it will be irrelevant (as most parties are). On the other hand, any political party that can’t scrape together 500 members from five (out of twelve) governorates will probably have little to impact on public life anyway. In fact, I suspect that none (until now) have done anything to increase their membership after licensing. I myself have approached a couple of political parties to join in the recent past, but they didn’t show any interest. These are run as social clubs, not as political parties.

So, it is laughable that the parties are threatening to boycott the upcoming elections unless the law is changed to ensure that party lists are elected. In the first place, who will notice? Secondly, they are asking for preferential treatment, ostensibly because they have something different to offer. What do they have to offer? Antics like this or this?

It occurs to me that somebody like Abdelrauf Rawabdeh, former prime minister and current deputy, did not run in the last election on a party slate. Moreover, he belongs to a small family from the town of Sarih (Irbid second district). He clearly could not win based on tribal considerations alone. And yet, he knew that no political party would have helped him win.

For all of the many faults of the politicians currently occupying their seats in the lower house, it seems that they understand their constituents and their needs more than the members of the political parties. They speak of their issues, and are interested (genuine or not) in their problems. None of the squawking irrelevant parties have convinced anybody that they are important or that they represent the needs of the people. Polls consistently show that people do not believe in them. I have said it before, and I will say it again: relevance can not be imposed or legislated.