Farcical Elections Offer Little Hope Across Middle East

The Economist recently published an article documenting democratic stagnation across the Middle East. Elections in Bahrain, Jordan, and Egypt have only led to the “perpetuation of rule by well-entrenched strongmen, the demoralisation and sometimes radicalisation of the forces opposed to them, and the degradation of the word democracy,” the author writes, adding that there is little difference between countries “that make a show of practising it and those, like Saudi Arabia, that do not even pretend.” According to The Economist, the Middle East’s democratic deficit is partially the result of uncertainty about what democratic governance should actually look like: “As many opinion polls have shown, Arabs sound keen on the idea of democracy. But what is understood by democracy, in a region with so few examples of it, remains open to question. Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, once described the Egyptian army as an example of democracy, on the ground that a commander weighs opinions from his officers before making a decision. By this definition, his party may deserve its name.”