Poll workers in Libya (Reuters)
With results from Libya’s first free elections, we now have a snapshot of political opinion in almost all Arab Spring countries. (Only Yemen is yet to hold post-despot elections.) So what are the main features of that snapshot?
The first is the remarkable diversity of opinion in countries where many saw a simple Islamists-vs.-military-despots division.
Some 26 parties contested Morocco’s election, while Libya’s attracted 131 parties and groups. Bring in Tunisia and Egypt, and the average number of parties in Arab Spring nations is around 40.
To be sure, most of these parties consist of a few hundred people, often united on local and/or clan interests. But we also have better-structured conservative, socialist, liberal and, of course, Islamist parties.
In short, these elections puncture the myth of Arab societies as monolithic entities. These are potentially open societies that could develop a rich spectrum of ideas.
The second feature is the uneven presence of Islamist parties. Muslims account for 85 percent to 98 percent of these countries’ populations, making them receptive to the Islamist message.
Most Islamist parties are linked together via the Muslim Brotherhood movement, a semi-clandestine organization founded in Egypt in 1928. Over the decades, the Brotherhood has created networks of support around the world, including in the West.
One of its ideological offshoots, the Justice and Development Party, has been governing Turkey for more than a decade. Another, Hamas, controls the Gaza strip. A third, Algeria’s Movement for a Peaceful Society, has been part of coalition governments since the 1990s.
The Brotherhood and other Islamist parties, including the more radical Salafist outfits in Egypt, have been bolstered by financial support from oil-rich Arab states and (in the case of Hamas) the European Union. Indeed, the recent campaigns showed that Islamists have resources beyond the dream of their secular rivals.
Despite this, nowhere was the Islamist bloc able to win the support of a majority of the electorate. In Egypt, Islamist parties contested the parliamentary elections as part of a coalition designed to hide their identity. Labeled more frankly in the presidential race, the two Islamist candidates won the support of around 30 percent of the vote in a 42 percent turnout. Islamists also ran under honest labels in Libya — and their total share of the vote stood at around 11 percent in a 60 percent turnout.
In Tunisia and Morocco, Islamist parties campaigned as traditional conservative movements and made little reference to Islam and shariah.
Despite the Brotherhood’s dominant position, the Islamist movement is no monolith. And as they emerge from clandestine life, the various Islamist outfits can now air their ideological differences in public.
Note, too, that the overtly radical Islamist parties did worse than the relatively moderate ones. The Libyan Society for Combat, which fought Col. Khadafy’s forces for decades, secured less than 2 percent of the Libyan vote. “The election showed that Libyans want something other than jihad,” says its leader, Sheik Abumundhar al-Saadi. “We will have to rethink our message and present a different program.”
The demand for “something other than jihad” is yet another feature of the emerging Arab snapshot. Campaigns from Morocco to Egypt showed that Arab Spring nations are more concerned about jobs, schools, hospitals and the overall state of the economy than waging “holy” war against the “Infidel.”
This interest in bread-and-butter politics — as opposed to abstract ideas about creating the ideal society or living “the perfect Islam” — may partly reflect the strong presence of women as voters and candidates.
That, of course, is no guarantee that Islamists won’t try to push women to the margins in the name of religion. Still, the voting showed that, from Morocco to Egypt, women represent a force to reckon with.
The Arab Spring elections also show that the Western strategy of supporting despotic regimes in the hope of achieving stability is no longer valid. It may have made some sense during the Cold War, but today it’s no more than a dangerous anachronism.
What the despots achieved was stagnation, not stability, ending in bloodshed — as witnessed in Syria today. Like everyone else, Arabs need freedom. Helping them achieve it is a better strategy for Western democracies.