Last Tuesday, November 20, Jordan held parliamentary elections to broad international acclaim. The vote was the second since Jordan’s monarch, King Abdullah II, took power in 1999, and independent Jordanian observers certified the election as free and fair. Indeed, the elections went smoothly, a record number of female candidates competed and won seats, and voter turnout was an impressive fifty-four percent. But these facts belie the tenuousness of Jordanian democracy: voter fraud was practically unnecessary because eligibility for the elections was so restricted; international observers were uninvited, and voter turnout was inflated by low registration rates and high returns in areas supporting pro-government candidates. In short, long-promised substantive reforms are still a way off, and may be slipping further away.
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