BICOM

The results were announced yesterday to Wednesday’s parliamentary election in Jordan, indicating that candidates loyal to the current government will dominate the newly empowered parliament.

The country’s monarch King Abdullah, whose father King Hussein signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, has faced small-scale demonstrations and calls for governmental reform over the past two years. In response, last year he introduced constitutional changes allowing the parliament a freer hand in introducing legislation and for the first time its members will help choose the prime minister. In addition, an Independent Electoral Commission was created to oversee Wednesday’s vote. Yet, despite the changes, the main opposition bloc, the Islamic Action Front, which is the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan boycotted the election, claiming that the electoral boundaries were fixed so as to under-represent their core support in the country’s cities.

Jordanian state television revealed the election results yesterday, which showed that independent candidates, whose loyalties depend largely on family and tribal affiliations rather than a political agenda, had won most of the 150 parliamentary seats. However, according to the Independent, despite the Islamic Action Group boycott, Islamist and other opposition candidates won more than thirty seats.

Officials announced that 56 per cent of the 2.3 million registered voters had cast their ballot. However, the Islamic Action Front claimed that only a fraction had actually voted, with the organisation’s deputy head quoted by Reuters saying, “The biggest absentee was the will of the people. The disappointment with the assembly will be quick.” The New York Times quoted representatives of independent foreign election observers, who said that improvements to Jordan’s electoral process had been made, but that the election was a vote of “representatives of parochial interests, rather than national legislators.”