The rise of political movements over parties is a direct function of a stolid inertia in the traditional political system, writes Gamil Mattar* The Egyptian elections offer an opportunity to test an idea that I have long been convinced is correct. Like anyone who has been keeping track of politics in the Arab world, I have noticed how moribund political parties are. Not that they ever managed to stand on their feet to begin with. Indeed, most are embryonic entities, still firmly ensconced in the womb of the state. Egypt offers an exception to the general rule. In Egypt, there had existed at one point some political parties that had attained a considerable degree of maturity, but then died out or was buried. More recently, some of these parties were revived and now are in the process of dying again. In all cases -- the embryonic and the resurrected -- the parties were parties in name only. They had no body, no mind and no spirit, even if they made some noise or if they produced candidates who, in fact, only represented themselves or at best their families and cliques. Nevertheless, certain alternatives to political parties appear to be getting stronger by the day. Among these is the political activity over the Internet. However, these "mass movements" are more spontaneous in nature. They are not structurally organised like societies or NGOs, which have specified aims or charters to give them substance and cohesion. They are more in the nature of "convergences", which coalesce randomly, continue intermittently, and intensify or dwindle in accordance with such factors as the importance of the occasion or the issue at hand, the public mood, the degree of government repression, and the attention of the international community or like-minded movements abroad. In general, the function of these movements is to voice discontent rather than promote a political vision or agenda. There are at least two reasons why this phenomenon has been on the rise in Egypt. One is the increasing emphasis the West -- specifically the US -- has been placing on the need to change certain political practices and forms of government in the Middle East, or on what has been erroneously termed "political reform". The combination of this attention from abroad and seething anger at home has propelled some expansion in the once rather narrow margin for the expression of opposing opinion, and this greater margin of freedom has allowed people to converge in streets and squares or on the steps of syndicate or court buildings to declare their dissatisfaction. A second reason is the current presidential campaigns. As election day approaches, the government and the ruling party have been keen to win the esteem of foreign powers -- the US in particular -- and project an image of how we do politics that will hopefully counteract those that Western media have at times distorted and at others transmitted with embarrassing accuracy. Towards this end, government and ruling party authorities have engaged techniques and expertise borrowed from those countries with a long tradition in the arts of advertising and public relations and poured these into creating the impression at home that the government really wants change and the impression abroad that the elections are being conducted in a way that observers and analysts outside can understand. The phenomenon is not unique to Egypt. It can be observed in varying degrees of pace and intensity in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia and Yemen. In most of these countries, too, these informal political movements are moving in to areas of activity once occupied by political parties. More importantly, they are acquiring growing popular appeal, and if this support is still hesitant it is still greater than that enjoyed by the existing political parties, if, indeed, they enjoy any support at all. Some of the factors that have contributed to this trend towards these types of movements are universal, applying even to those countries with a strong history of democratic political party plurality. Other factors pertain specifically to developing countries or those with a long history of authoritarian rule or incomplete democratic institutions and in which the bond of mutual trust between the ruling authorities and the governed populace is weak. Foremost among the latter is the decline in the ideological commitment among politicians and intellectuals and an increasing disposition towards self-promotion, adopting or discarding ideological slogans as circumstances and political winds dictate. This applies also at the level of political parties, some of which were founded upon ideological platforms but which later abandoned these platforms as a result of political developments, changing social attitudes or the pressures of globalisation. I would suggest that the lack of grassroots legitimacy is among the reasons why some political parties have shifted towards an Islamist outlook or, in certain cases, courted alliances with Islamists in spite of the large gap between their respective ideological principles. Many Arab governments have acted no less pragmatically, using various forms of religious propaganda and mobilisation to establish their own credentials and draw support away from the leftist opposition. The result, as has become abundantly apparent, is that the popular base of support for political Islamist movements has expanded exponentially at the expense of secular political parties and their powers of mobilisation and recruitment. At the same time the dichotomy between religion and politics, with all its attendant complexities and sensitivities, has contributed to further alienating people from involvement in political parties, increasing their propensity to sympathise with these movements. These amorphous entities -- the term "entity" here being used very loosely -- parade beneath simple catchy banners and generally offer themselves up as forms of peaceful political activism in which people can vent their anger by means of their feet rather than their pens. Anger, as the history of modern Arab politics informs us, is a frowned-upon sentiment that is neither expressed easily nor treated kindly. Anyone who has led or participated in the organisation of these grassroots movements is aware that they have evolved into the foremost source for the recruitment and training of new political leaderships and other such tasks that established political parties had once been expected to perform. That these parties abandoned these tasks or never performed them adequately is due to any number of reasons, including the desire of the old guard to safeguard their status and privileges and the desire of some party members to keep their acts of corruption under wraps or to prevent younger generations from sharing in the spoils. The mass movement organisers also realise that the opposition has a more viable future in entities that are more loosely structured than political parties and which cannot be pinned down to an itemised agenda and a specified programme of action. I would also suggest that similar developments in the US have increased the confidence of political Islamists in the Arab world that they stand a greater chance of augmenting their influence if they abandon the idea of founding a religious political party. Their thinking probably runs that as long as political party life is in decline anyway there is little point in risking confrontation with the authorities for the sake of an objective that has lost the appeal and value it held in past decades. In the US, Christian fundamentalism attained its highest level of political influence after having evolved into a movement that acquired momentum and a mass following on the basis of systematic campaigns against certain social and moral conditions. These fundamentalist movements were thus able to accomplish most of their objectives without running afoul of government authorities, the constitution or political party traditions. They certainly did not attempt to form a political party on religious lines, which would have shaken the foundations of the American system. I further believe that in its handling of the question of democratisation and change in the Arab world and the interplay between various governments, political parties and religious and non-religious movements in this process, Washington is strongly influenced by its own experience with grassroots movements such as the fundamentalist movement and the protest movements against globalisation and the war in Iraq. Meanwhile, at the upper echelons of power in some Arab countries there has evolved a distinct class of political, cultural, economic, administrative and security leaders. These leaders have two characteristics in common. The first is that they all feel they have played an important role in the affairs of the state in the past and will continue to do so in the future. The second is that they feel bound to one another by some unwritten contract that states that they must toe the line with the general consensus of their class or risk losing some of their very considerable privileges. This does not mean that there is no scope for differences, as long as these differences are marginal and, above all, not aired in public. Contrary to what some might imagine, this class is not a vague hypothetical phenomenon. It consists of concrete identifiable figures that have wielded, and continue to wield, considerable political influence through their positions in companies, banks, financial markets or national councils for culture and the arts. What most unites the members of this class is their perception of a threat from the lower echelons of society, or worse from parts of society that are not easily identifiable and, therefore, unpredictable. The increasing control this "ruling" elite has acquired in many Arab societies, combined with its mounting state of paranoia, has worked to further debilitate political parties, ruling ones included. If one seeks personal or material advancement, the route towards that end is not through political parties whose activities are heavily encumbered by restrictions but through the patronage of and eventual membership in the elite cliques that run Arab countries. Little wonder, therefore, that existing political parties have lost so many of their most talented members, and with them their dynamism, ideas and expertise. Such elites exist in the West as well. A property common to them all is that in the pursuit of their ends they have, whether by design or not, undermined the middle classes, which are the classes most of their members come from and also the classes that form the primary mainstay of political parties. It is also from the middle classes that there emerged in recent years the individuals who realised that their prospects for political advancement were blocked both by the clogged arteries of political party life and by the ceiling imposed by the dominant elites. The alternative they found was to embark in the domain of social work, establishing, for example, organisations for human and civil rights advocacy. These activities gave them a platform for political recruitment and grassroots contact with the economically and politically marginalised sectors of society, functions that established political parties had long since ceased performing. However, the ruling authorities would not be so easily circumvented, and they used whatever ordinary and extraordinary powers at their disposal to restrict the freedom to create NGOs and to curtail their activities. What the authorities have failed to appreciate is that in taking such actions they are only propelling increasing numbers of people to form the mass movements that will avail themselves of whatever space open to them on the streets or over the Internet to fill the void created by the collapse of political party system, to break the monopoly of the powerful ruling cliques and to inject new life into NGOs and other organs of civil society. * The writer is director of the Arab Centre for Development and Futuristic Research.
