New Opposition in the Middle East by Dara Conduit & Shahram Akbarzadeh

Author:Dara Conduit & Shahram Akbarzadeh
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811088216
Publisher: Springer Singapore

Al-Wefaq’s five years in parliament closely resembled the experience of a ‘tolerated’ authoritarian opposition , whose inclusion is designed to ease pressure on hybrid regimes to enact genuine democratic reforms, without fundamentally challenging the structure of a political system that favours an unelected executive. The existence of groups such as al-Wefaq, which cannot be conceived of as a loyalist opposition, offers ‘a higher degree of legitimacy to the polity compared to hegemonic, mainly coercive forms of dictatorship.’39 However, given the events of 2011, it is possible that the government overplayed its hand in blocking much of al-Wefaq’s legislative agenda, which prevented the group from presenting its constituents with a sufficient number of concessions to justify its participation in parliament. As Albrecht notes, authoritarian oppositions are typically caught ‘between contestation and complicity’40—they need to be perceived of as maintaining their independence in order to avoid accusations of co-optation, which would threaten the underlying premise of a hybrid regime in the first place. This inevitably requires ‘contentious performances’41 involving moderate opposition to government policy, with the ‘tolerated’ group putting forward an alternative policy platform to that of the government, yet not so contentious that it crosses key red lines such as challenging the structure or legitimacy of the political system itself. Hybrid regimes need to allow the ‘tolerated’ opposition a certain number of victories so that its constituents feel they are benefiting from the hybrid system and perhaps develop a stake in maintaining it. As one al-Wefaq member commented in 2015, ‘fourteen years ago we got a form of democracy. If it was a real democracy we wouldn’t have had an Arab Spring.’42 The Bahraini government’s failure to construct a hybrid system capable of living up to the expectations of openness and consultation fostered by its own NAC reforms arguably led to the eruption of mass pro-democracy protests in February 2011.

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