According to the latest figures from the Independent Election Commission, the number of political parties stands at thirty, a drop of eight since the last parliamentary elections. Party membership is estimated at about 85,000, a slight decrease from the level after the initial launch phase.
اضافة اعلان
These numbers of parties and party members are not small, even after the eight left the scene, whether by merging into larger parties or through dissolution orders against some that failed to regularize their status.
More important, official sources confirm that the overwhelming majority of the current House of Representatives are party members. Official data indicates 130 party-affiliated deputies out of 138, distributed among several parliamentary blocs, whose party presence varied in the last session according to performance indicators monitored by more than one body.
Yet what is striking, after reviewing these large figures of party membership and dominance of parliament, is the stillness that marks party life in the country.
It is true that the parliamentary recess reduces the parties' presence in public affairs. But even when parliamentary sessions are in progress, it is usually the deputies who show up, while the blocs and parties are absent, with rare exceptions.
The problem, it seems, lies outside the walls of parliament rather than within it, meaning in the parties themselves as semi-paralyzed institutions. At the most recent conferences of two of the largest political parties, the leadership ranks were chosen by acclamation rather than election. Parties whose very philosophy rests on the idea of democracy skip the ballot box and choose their leaders in traditional ways.
What I want to say here is that having thirty parties or twenty means nothing unless there is a party life that the parties live as a tangible reality inside their bodies, and which the public feels as an influential presence in the affairs of their lives.
It makes no sense that parties controlling almost all the seats in parliament should have such a modest presence in public life. There is a contradiction here that can be neither understood nor justified.
By presence, I do not mean opposition to the government or street activism, but activity across the diverse fields of public work: media, culture, and political engagement that keeps pace with the transformations the country is going through and the major changes the region is experiencing.
Parties should be at the forefront of public work, instead of the diwans, tribal delegations and receptions whose news floods social media platforms, and which in form and substance reflect a Jordanian era that has passed, not a modern state paving the way for a second centenary amid the storms and fires of the region.
We understand that the party experience is in its early days, but we have enough accumulated experience to skip some stages, especially at a time when it has become possible to build mass communication networks quickly, with the knowledge, culture and expertise those tools provide in mobilization, influence and networking at the national level.
I believe the problem is that we were content with the existence of parties and ignored the need for party life. Otherwise, how do we explain the parties' overwhelming presence in parliament and their absence from public life?
The paradox in the party scene generally is that everyone, including us in the media, talks about the parties and their concerns and diagnoses their problems and the obstacles facing the experiment, except the parties themselves, which offer no opinion or word on any of it.
Perhaps the time has come to hold a political retreat in which the parties give their views on party work from the standpoint of their own experience. These would be sessions of party venting, with no speaker held to account for what is said, in the hope that we can unravel the puzzles of the parties' stagnant state in public life and draw a road map out of the gray zone, before the next parliamentary elections catch up with us and we fall into what we fell into before.
