Partnership and Rescue Party and the Transformation of Political Opposition in Jordan

Abstract

In Jordan, the main regime, as a successful political survival strategy, while skillfully forming a tight pro-regime political coalition all along, has kept an even firmer grip on the political opposition. The political opposition in the country, the Muslim Brotherhood, and its political wing the Islamic Action Front (IAF) being the leading front, sometimes boycotted the elections as a response to or compromised with the regime. This latter approach has also been embraced by the parties which emerged out of the MB, including the National Congress Party and the Muslim Brotherhood Association; however, another splinter party, the Partnership and Rescue Party (PRP) criticized them for their incompetence in acting as a true opposition. This is the juncture this paper problematizes—the IAF seems to have lost its ability to act as the main opposition, and the newly emerged PRP prospectively stands out as the leading candidate to replace it. This paper examines the transformation of the political oppositional block in Jordan and elaborates on its consequences for the MB and the regime–opposition relations. In relation to this, in the conceptual level, the paper also reflects on the relevance of this transformation to the post-Islamism debate: in this instance, the PRP denouncing the political Islamic ideology and positioning itself in the center of the political spectrum while maintaining the claim that it has taken over the main opposition role/legacy of the MB evoke a post-Islamist tendency. The argumentation in the article is built on primary sources, including interviews with the opposition leaders and prominent opposition members.