Debunking the Myth of “Sham Elections” in the Middle East

A November 2023 article in The Economist, titled “The Middle East Faces a Series of Sham Elections”, characterises political regimes in the region as collectively consumed by an authoritarian sclerosis that renders them immune to any possibility of change via electoral institutions. “The elections will be farcical”, the piece declares. “Results are decided in advance.” The authors of this piece are by no means the first to make this claim: for decades, scholars and other observers have puzzled over why non-democratic regimes choose to hold elections, one core component of procedural democracy. While an earlier strand of this literature frames such elections as mere performance or “window dressing” for the regimes that hold them, a robust scholarly literature actually finds exactly the opposite.For decades, scholars and other observers have puzzled over why non-democratic regimes choose to hold elections  In short, elections even in less-than-democratic contexts can promote intense political competition that sometimes brings about unexpected changes in the composition and power of the ruling elite.

The beyond-symbolic significance of elections under authoritarianism has been amply demonstrated by several elections held in 2024 throughout the Middle East. Various national elections (this piece will refrain from discussing local/municipal races) held in the region this year also demonstrate the wide variation in how elections shape regimes across different non-democratic contexts. While September’s presidential elections in Algeria, for example, may come the closest to The Economist’s “sham” descriptor – characterised by widespread fraud, low participation rates, and near-total repression of opposition actors – other 2024 elections are not so straightforwardly contrived, either in process or outcome. In Iran and Jordan, presidential and national legislative elections (respectively) earlier this year were characterised by intense competition and, ultimately, the empowerment of longstanding opposition (broadly defined) movements and actors.

Moreover, these elections and the surprising results they brought cannot be explained solely through the lens of macrostructural change – i.e., the ongoing and increasingly regionalised conflict in Gaza, or the effects of the United States and Western Europe’s sanctions regime on Iran. Instead, the interplay between these structural factors, on the one hand, and the agency of domestic opposition and regime actors, on the other, provides a more complete and nuanced understanding of why elections matter, even when they are not “free and fair” by conventional standards.

Iran’s Presidential Elections: Surprising Reformist Victory

Iran held two rounds of presidential elections in June and July 2024, following the death of former President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash in May. Iran’s elections at the presidential and legislative levels are frequently competitive, but far from fully “free and fair” – the appointed Guardian Council vets candidates and has ultimate discretion over whether they are allowed to run, and this mechanism has been frequently used since the inception of the Islamic Republic in 1979 to bar opposition or reformist candidates from seeking office. In the 2024 elections, for example, only six out of 80 candidates who registered for the presidential race were allowed to run.

Despite this clear violation of democratic principles, the six candidates who ran in Iran’s June elections represented a wide array of ideological positions, ranging from several conservative “hard-liners” (e.g. Saeed Jalili and Mohammad Ghalibaf) to more reformist or “moderate” candidates, chiefly Masoud Pezeshkian, who was backed by a variety of pragmatic reformist groups. The first round of elections produced a runoff between Jalili and Pezeshkian, while the second round resulted in higher turnout rates and, ultimately, a victory for the reformist camp, led by Pezeshkian.

Pezeshkian’s victory came after three years of conservative rule under former President Raisi, which coincided with both an economic downturn and widespread anti-government protests following the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022. Elections, even under severe constraints like those in Iran’s institutional setup, provide a potent, if limited, vehicle for public expression As such, his win can be interpreted as a clear public rebuke of conservative leadership on a range of economic and social issues. But more significantly, his victory demonstrates that elections, even under severe constraints like those in Iran’s institutional setup, provide a potent, if limited, vehicle for public expression. This also helps make sense of why non-democratic regimes like Iran’s would risk holding elections in the first place – they allow elites to “take the temperature” of the public and recalibrate accordingly.

Jordan’s Legislative Elections: Surge in Support for the Islamist Opposition

Such temperature-taking also recently happened in Jordan, a monarchy where competitive elections also regularly occur. Unlike in Iran, candidates in Jordanian legislative elections are not vetted by the regime, but elections there are frequently subjected to allegations of vote-buying and fraud – all occurring within a context where freedom of expression and collective action are severely limited. In other words, different but important constraints also exist on electoral institutions in the Jordanian context.

With that said, the September 2024 legislative elections in Jordan brought about important changes in the distribution of what limited independent power is allocated to legislators. The Islamic Action Front (IAF), the Muslim Brotherhood’s affiliated movement in Jordan, won 31 out of 138 seats in the legislature, tripling its numbers and making it the largest opposition group in the country by seat share.

The IAF’s gains in the Jordanian elections have been widely interpreted as a reaction by the Jordanian public to the ongoing war in Gaza. This is not false, but does assume an overly simplistic linkage between this regional conflict and domestic support for Islamist opposition. One does not inevitably follow from another, due to some supposed co-religionist ties between Muslims in Jordan and Gaza. Instead, following the start of the conflict, the IAF deftly positioned itself as supporting an end to the Jordanian government’s peace treaty with Israel and promoted itself as the key protector of Jordan against Israeli aggression – contrasting itself with the government, which has suppressed pro-Palestine protests over the past year. In other words, the IAF’s mobilisation strategy in the face of these unexpected regional events also played a key role in its success.

In summary, elections in the Middle East, like in much (if not all) of the world, exist in a complex grey zone between procedurally “free and fair” in accordance with democratic ideals and mere “sham”. In places like Iran and Jordan, electoral politics are contentious, competitive, and they produce unexpected results that, while not overthrowing autocratic regimes outright, force them to recalibrate their balance of cooptative and coercive strategies.