AMMAN — The
Lower House of Parliament on Tuesday passed the elections draft law after approving all 74
articles, thus completing the required constitutional amendments needed to modernize
the political system, having earlier passed the political parties law.
اضافة اعلان
Senator
Jamil Al-Nimri said that the essence of the draft law is to make “the political arena partisan,”
adding that the next elections will be a “filtering station” for small parties.
Nimri believes however that the parties “cannot abolish tribalism, but they can
gear it towards political modernization.”
The modernization
efforts aim “to transform parliamentary elections into an agenda-based party
competition by moving away from independent local competition to national
partisanship and arrive at a Parliament formed by political party blocs,” said
Nimri.
Nimri explained that the
elections and political parties laws came to put the country on the road to
parliamentary governments, in phases, by gradually increasing the number of
seats allocated to political parties. “This would push independents to join
parties and tribesmen would become integrated within the parties and hence
obligated to choose their representatives from a certain party,” Nimri noted.
Secretary-General of the
Islamic Action Front Party Murad Al-Adayleh said that there is no value for any
legislation related to the election law without an appropriate environment for
political action.
“The situation today is one
in which partisan, civil, and union life is being crushed,” said Adayleh,
adding that any discourse about legislation is not sufficient at a time “when partisans
are being pursued and political parties are being engineered in their practice
of political life.” He stressed that no political project can stand in an
atmosphere of exclusion, “and this is our situation today in Jordan.”
Director of the Legal
Department of the Partnership and Salvation Party
Loay Obeidat said that the
recent amendments to the Constitution have “led to eliminating the idea of
parliamentary governments, and the constitutional amendments that were made in
2014, 2016, and 2022 had stripped governments of their powers.”
Obeidat pointed out that
there no longer exists any value for the existence of a partisan majority in
Parliament, and that the election system does not provide an opportunity for
any political party to obtain a majority because the election system is based
on the idea of small constituencies and completely prevents national lists from
becoming a force. “Even if they obtained a majority in the Parliament, the Constitution
has taken away their pivotal competencies,” he said.
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