“WHOOPS!” seems to be all aghast officials can say. On either side of the River Jordan, the Hashemite kingdom and the Palestinian Authority have called elections expecting easy wins. Instead, to their surprise, the local arms of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group, have ended their boycotts of the ballot and are now the front-runners. The king’s men in Jordan anticipate that the Islamic Action Front (IAF), the brothers’ political arm in Jordan, will emerge from the general elections on September 20th as the largest single party. In adjacent Palestine, ministers speculate that Hamas, the Brotherhood’s Palestinian offshoot, might sweep all eight of the West Bank’s cities in municipal elections set for October 8th.
This would mark a turn for democratic Islamism, which had seemed on the verge of oblivion in the Arab world after the Brotherhood’s Muhammad Morsi was overthrown as president of Egypt in 2013. Hounded into hiding and despairing of electoral politics, Sunni Islamists across the region abandoned the ballot box for bullets and boats to Europe. King Abdullah of Jordan declared the Brotherhood “a Masonic cult” and banned it (although he eschewed the mass arrests that have taken place in Egypt). Now, both the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and King Abdullah will have to engage with the Islamists again. “We’re not Cairo,” proffers...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2bIPwmI
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