Illusions of Change

Abstract

����� �� Many observers regarded 1999 as a year of progress for democracy in the Arab world. Yemen, Egypt, and Tunisia all held presidential elections in what was deemed a relatively free atmosphere. In September, Algeria held a referendum on a “Civil Concord” that sought to end a seven-year civil war by offering amnesty to Islamist rebels who would lay down their arms. Combined with the recent changing of the guard in Jordan and Morocco, where young monarchs succeeded the two most veteran Arab rulers, these events were widely viewed as a significant move toward more pluralistic and participatory politics. But are we actually witnessing meaningful political change? There is reason for doubt. Mubarak has been elected for the fourth time, Tunisia’s Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali for the third time, and Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh for the second time—after 18, 12, and five years of rule, respectively. Mubarak ran unopposed, while Saleh faced just one token candidate from within his own party (the candidacies of leaders of the opposition parties were not approved by the Electoral Committee). In Tunisia, the two contenders allowed to run came from minor opposition parties and got barely 0.6 percent of the vote. This compelled the presidential palace, which had promised that the opposition would get one-fifth of the seats in the parliamentary elections, to resort to changing the size of electoral districts in order to give the opposition its “due share” of the parliamentary vote. In Algeria, all six opposition candidates planning to run in the April 1999 elections against the army’s candidate, Abd al-Aziz Bouteflika, quit the race in protest against the government’s strong-arm tactics against their activists. In the run-up to the September referendum, no advertisements opposed to Emmanuel Sivan is professor of history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is the author of numerous works, including Radical Islam (1990) and Mythes politiques arabes (1995), and the editor of War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (1999).