Jordan elections: How will electoral reforms impact the September 10 polls?

Amman, Jordan – Citizens will vote in historic elections for the Parliament of Jordan’s 138-seat lower house on Tuesday.

The parliamentary elections are the first since the 2022 constitutional amendments and the implementation of new laws governing elections and political parties aimed at democratisation and increasing the role of political parties in a country where tribal affiliations play a dominant political role.

What are these laws? And will they make a difference in how Jordan is governed?

Here’s what you need to know:

When were the reforms approved?

Jordan’s King Abdullah II formed the Royal Committee to Modernise the Political System in 2021. The committee’s recommendations were approved in March 2022.

The new electoral law paved the way for a bigger role for political parties and also took measures to increase women’s representation in the House of Representatives, the lower chamber of Parliament.

People directly elect representatives to the House every four years, but all 65 members of Parliament’s upper chamber are appointed by the king.

What did they change?

Candidates will compete in 18 local districts in an open-list proportional representation system (OLPR) – introduced in a 2016 reform – for 97 out of 138 parliamentary seats. The last parliamentary elections in 2020 divided voting into 23 electoral districts for 130 seats.

An OLPR system allows voters to cast ballots for individual candidates on a party’s list.

Seats reserved for women have increased to 18 from 15 in the past. The number of seats reserved for Christians has decreased from nine to seven since the last elections, and seats reserved for the Chechen and Circassian minorities have decreased from three to two.

The key change will be that licenced political parties can now compete in a closed-list proportional representation system (CLPR) for the remaining 41 parliamentary seats allocated to the national district.

In a CLPR system, voters can effectively only vote for a political party as a whole, not for an individual candidate.

Why were reforms introduced?

Jordan’s electoral system has been criticised by rights groups for favouring tribally affiliated independent candidates over political parties.

Voting has also been stronger in rural and tribal areas, which the reform tried to address with its national district system.

The reforms were an attempt to “de-tribalise Parliament” and “revamp political life in Jordan”, Merissa Khurma, director of the Middle East Program at the Wilson Center, told Al Jazeera.

Turnout was just 29 percent in the November 2020 elections, down from 36 percent in 2016, a drop that Khaled Kalaldeh, the chief commissioner of the state-run Independent Election Commission at the time, attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sean Yom, an expert on Jordan at Temple University, thinks it is important to view these reforms in the context of economic and political crises unleashed by the Arab Spring.

In addition, Jordan has suffered inefficiency, corruption and high unemployment – 21 percent in the first quarter of 2024 – that impact “almost all sectors of society, apart from a very narrow capitalist and political elite”, Yom said.

Israel’s war on Gaza and regional tensions have also affected the tourism sector in Jordan, which amounts to around 14 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

The reforms signal an attempt by the state to show that it hears the public’s concerns and “that it does have a positive democratic vision for Jordan”, Yom said.

He noted that the steps are also an attempt to show international allies – particularly the United States, the most important donor to Jordan – that it is “a liberal progressive state that is trying to make good on its promise to liberalise”.

Who would they impact?

Experts say it is unlikely that the reforms will create a completely new political landscape in these elections, but they could lead to incremental improvements.

Khurma explained that Jordan does not have an open “political culture” yet, and many new political parties in these elections lack a clear programme.

She said they will not greatly impact this election’s turnout, pointing out that it is still expected to be low.

The elections come during the “highly tense political environment” created by Israel’s war on Gaza, she said, and Jordan is also in a “very challenging economic environment with very high unemployment”, issues that could dilute public interest in incremental changes to electoral laws.

Jordan has attempted to walk a political tightrope during the war by maintaining diplomatic relations with Israel and even intervening in Iran’s retaliatory attack on Israel in April when Jordan shot down missiles as they flew over its territory.

This stance has angered a significant portion of Jordan’s citizens, many of whom are descendants of the Palestinians forced out of their lands in both the Nakba and the 1967 war.

The turnout among Jordanian citizens of Palestinian origin was particularly low in the 2020 elections, averaging just 10 percent in the country’s capital, Amman.