Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Recently the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood issued a draft of its first ever political party platform, making major strides toward a comprehensive public policy program espousing freedom of expression and pluralistic politics - ideals that were previously immaterial to Islamist discourse in Egypt. While the Brotherhood remains a movement without a political party - barred by the Egyptian government and a constitutional prohibition against parties based on religious preferences - the movement's new party platform gives policymakers and experts plenty of reason to take notice.
The Muslim Brotherhood's draft party platform sends mixed signals about the movement's political views and positions. Although it has already been widely circulated, the document does not yet have final approval from the movement's guidance bureau.
Nothing in Arab politics ought to encourage more hope than gradual democratisation in stable nation states. Sadly, last week's surprising results in Morocco's parliamentary elections, which thrust that country's democratic experience into the spotlight, demonstrates that political reform is under threat because of growing public disenchantment with the distribution of real power.
In the opening years of this century, the world was presented with a historic confrontation between the Western world and the Islamic and Arab world. In this context, Washington's policies--and its attempts to counter the backlash from these policies--have increasingly pushed Arabs away.
Morocco conducted elections to the lower chamber of the parliament, the House of Representatives, on September 7. Local and international monitoring groups confirmed that the elections were conducted in a fair and transparent manner. However, voter turnout plunged to a historical low of 37 percent, down from 51 percent in the 2002 elections and 58 percent in 1997.
A series of unusual scenes on the streets of the Middle East nurtured an inspiring story line of an emerging “Arab spring” that mimicked the earlier triumph of democracy from the Philippines to Prague: mass demonstrations in Lebanon; joint rallies of Egyptian Islamists and liberals against the Mubarak regime; and elections in Iraq, the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Egypt and even Saudi Arabia.
The major electoral success of the Turkish Justice and Development Party (JDP) led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan urges reflection on the experience of Turkish Islamists and the trajectory of the development of their political identity. It further urges study of their role in public life and the ramifications that the Turkish experience may have on Islamist activity in the Arab world.
At a time when Islamist movements across the Arab world have chosen to participate in official political processes, grave concerns have arisen over the nature and repercussions of this participation and over whether the Islamists are equipped to rule should they rise to power through democratic means.
Egypt still represents the best chance for U.S. democracy promotion in the Arab world in the near future, according to this Policy Brief by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
