Muhannad Alazzeh

There was nothing surprising or out of the ordinary in Jordan's twentieth parliamentary elections, whether in the voter turnout, which did not exceed 32%, or in the results, which highlighted the superiority of the political Islam movement, represented by the Islamic Action Front Party, which won 31 seats, or more than 22% of the total number of seats in the House of Representatives.

A number of observers of political and parliamentary affairs wondered about the reason for this sweeping progress of the Muslim Brotherhood in these elections, and multiple analyses were launched, some attributing it to the prevailing regional circumstances, especially the war on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, while others found the answer in the lack of real competition from other parties, whether old or emerging, due to the weakness of their programs. These analyses are partly correct, but what needs to be investigated are the root causes that always lead Islamist movements to win any political competition, be it parliamentary, local or union elections.

The IAF adopted the same traditional strategy used by its parent movement (the Muslim Brotherhood) in achieving notable gains in Jordan's 20th parliamentary elections. The first element of this strategy was to capitalize on the crises accompanying the elections, and nothing provokes people's feelings and emotions more than the current aggression on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, so the slogans and speeches of the party's candidates were in line with the rules of investment and appealing to the feelings of collective anger at what is happening in Gaza and the inability of the Arab and Islamic regimes to take steps to quench this anger even slightly, beyond fundraising campaigns and issuing statements of condemnation, to throw its weight around this positioning vacuum and present itself as usual as the savior and solution through religious slogans.

The second element on which the IAF party relied and traded in the 20th parliamentary elections, was the boring conspiracy narrative that haunts societies that feel intellectually, scientifically and politically weak and find only to blame the other for their backwardness as the cause of their miserable state and deteriorating conditions. The IAF through its representatives in the previous parliament, was not ashamed to play this card to the furthest extent, exceeding every moral and human value.

This was manifested by fighting the Child Rights Law and distorting the greatest human values that call for respecting the child's evolving identity and dressing these values and principles on which the civilized nations of the earth are unanimous with fabricated suspicions “homosexuality”, just as they did during the discussion of the recent constitutional amendments concerning the proposal to add the word ‘Jordanian women’ to the title of the chapter on the rights and duties of citizens in the constitution, where they made us the trended joke of the world as they practiced their ideological perversion and fabricated doubts about this word, which their distorted imagination went so far as to make it also a window for “homosexuality”, not to mention The pathological sensitivity that they suffer whenever they read or hear the word (gender), as they perceive it leads to “moral corruption and homosexuality”.

Regardless of the secret of this strange syndrome between rights and “perversion” that those people suffer from, what is important here is that the representatives of this party brought during their election campaigns the myth of “conspiracy against us from the West” Without telling us who exactly this West is, and without explaining how and why this West has served and supported the Palestinian cause and the victims of violence and torture in our countries more than them, and why the western countries shelter the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood and allows them to practice their political and media activities without restrictions, and how it gives them what they are denied in their countries, and yet they conspire against the Islamic countries!

The third element that served the IAF party in the elections, was the dissolution of the Teachers' Syndicate following the 2019 strike, which was called and organized by members of the syndicate who are among the first row of the IAF party, and some of them went to the elections, so a large number of teachers who were disgruntled with their living conditions rushed to elect the party and its representatives, not necessarily believing in their programs but to spite the state that dissolved their syndicate.

In addition to all of the above, of course, the weakness of the competitors from other parties, either because of their newness or because the old ones did not evolve and remained stuck with their methods and slogans, most of which have become obsolete, the IAF way to win a large number of the seats in the 20th parliament was smooth and well-paved.

There is no denying that the victory of the IAF party reflects the will of those who went out to vote, in the same time it reflects the frustration and despair of the majority who did not vote. Nothing can balance the scales and put the political Islam movements in their rightful place as fundamentalist movements that adopt an extreme exclusionary ideology despite the acrobatic pragmatism they practice from time to time, except the presence of a strong secular civil movement that addresses the mind and shows the spaces of tolerance, coexistence and respect for diversity, disagreement and difference and relevant values that political Islam does not know because these values could be the elements of its undermining and collapse.