The epicenter of Arab politics, located in the palaces of despots and secret-police headquarters, has shifted to the street. With daily demonstrations in every Arab state, the street has also ended the political role that mosques and madrassas played under despotism.
Like other forms of politics, street politics has its limits. It can force a transition. But when dominated by mobs, it can also serve as pretext for repression.
At some point, Arab politics must come out of the streets. Where could it go?
In 1848, street politics, baptized “the European spring,” ended in Louis Bonaparte and Otto von Bismarck. Soviet tanks in Prague and rejuvenated Gaulist power in Paris ended the second European “spring” in 1968.
Today, the “Arab spring” could end in a new, strengthened, autocracy, with the military-security tandem as its backbone. That would be sold as “change within the regime,” as opposed to regime change. It would be bad for Arabs and bad for the democracies led by America.
Another way leads to civil war. That happens when the street isn’t strong enough to storm the palace while the palace is too weak to clear the street. This, too, would be bad for Arabs and the West.
The third — and best — way is to guide Arab politics out of the street and into someplace with a roof: a parliament.
This path requires free and fair elections — the faster the better. We shouldn’t give the shaken forces of oppression time to regroup and “manage” future elections, as they did for decades.
But in Washington one hears a cacophony of opposition to holding elections. Some, including a few of the original architects of George W. Bush’s “Freedom Agenda,” have adopted an “Alice in Wonderland” posture: Elections tomorrow, elections yesterday, but never, never today.
Their argument is that early elections could favor Islamists because they are the best organized. They point to Hamas’ victory in the 2006 Palestinian elections as a cautionary tale. But they forget that Hamas and its non-Islamist allies won only 42 percent of the vote against a corrupt and unpopular Fatah that should’ve been crushed in a landslide. Worse, that election’s diabolical rules had been fixed to give the party with the most votes even more advantages.
For the last 100 years, no Islamist party has won more than a quarter of the vote in any reasonably free elections anywhere in the Muslim world. The only possible exception is Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), which garnered more than 40 percent in two general elections — running on a strictly secular platform. And the AKP, like Hamas, has benefited from election rules that are among the most convoluted in history.
In any case, it is a bit rich to suggest that Arabs should hold elections only if we like the results in advance.
Nor should fear of election results translate into support for “despotism lite,” as some of President Obama’s advisers propose.
The argument that Arabs and Muslims in general need a training period for elections is patronizing and counterproductive. Democracy is like swimming: You learn it by doing it, making mistakes in the process.
The prospect of early elections — especially in Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain and Oman — would force the disparate “street” forces to get together, shape programs and agree on an alternative system of government. This would speed up the formation of political parties as essential ingredients of new regimes.
In Iraq, elections helped defeat the remnants of Saddamism and their Islamist allies. Iraqi elections also showed that political (and even sectarian) battles are best fought in a parliament rather than streets. In Lebanon, elections provide a substitute for perpetual civil war.
In Indonesia, parliamentary and presidential elections ensured transition from dictatorship to democracy. Elections are possibly the only glue that keeps together multifaith Malaysia.
In some Arab countries (notably Morocco, Jordan and Kuwait), reasonably competitive, though not fully free, elections have produced more stability than despotic regimes in Tunisia or Egypt ever dreamt of. In Algeria, the presidential and parliamentary elections of the mid-’90s helped end a civil war that had claimed more than 200,000 lives.
The Arabs want free and fair elections. America and other democracies should help them secure what they demand.