Democracy in the Middle East: What is the Role of Elections?

It's become pretty routine for Ted Eagles to take me and small groups of SPS students out to think tanks for enlightening discussions, and last week's visit to the Washington, DC branch of Stanford's Hoover Institution was no exception. The diverse panel of experts in the conference room above New York Avenue where the event was held included Hussain Abdul-Hussain, the Washington Burreau Chief of Alrai, a Kuwaiti newspaper, Hanin Ghaddar, the Friedmann Visiting Fellow at the The Washington Institute's Geduld Institute on Arab Politics and an expert on Shia politics, and Dr. Aykan Erdemir, a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and former Turkish Parliament member (2011-2015). Surrounded by slogans like "free enterprise" and "improving the human condition" we heard this panel discuss recent elections in Turkey, Lebanon, and Iraq, and what the value of democracy is in a region where elections can hardly be categorized as "fair" or "free."

Of the three panelists, Dr. Erdemir's perspective was notably bleak. Since a failed coup rocked the Turkish political scene in the summer of 2016, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has overstepped more and more democratic boundaries, imprisoning journalists, rigging elections, and restructuring the Turkish government in his favor. Now that Erdogan has once again "won" the most recent election (there was widespread rigging of the news media in Erdogan's favor, with one of his opponents receiving a total of 15 minutes of air time and speaking from prison and there were reports of widespread reports of voter intimidation), he has taken even more liberties in his consolidation of power, giving himself a decree power that basically renders the Turkish assembly irrelevant. Although voter participation is at a record high of 85% in many elections, Dr. Erdemir voiced a widespread sense of Turkish defeatism that democracy can only function as a speed bump or temporary roadblock against Erdogan's frightening consolidation of power.

In Iraq and Lebanon, the situation is notably more complicated. Both nations are governed by parliamentary democracies, but their party systems are based on entrenched sectarian divides, with the Lebanese parliament literally divided by religion, with the ratios of representation based on a 1930s census, because Lebanon has refused to perform one since. The problems arise because voters are given a very narrow selection of candidates belonging to their religious group and thus are not able to exercise much democratic influence. This systemic stagnation is worsened by the immense control Hezbolah controls in the Shia population and in the government as a whole and by the Iranian efforts to help establish a religious "parallel state." Ghaddar saw the future of Lebanese democracy in independent Shia candidates who ran against Hezbolah candidates at great risk to their own lives and in the few "Civil Society" candidates running on platforms of Western liberal democracy, who a rising force in Lebanese politics, though they were only able to win two seats in the last elections.