Erin Buckley
The resilience of authoritarian regimes in the Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) regions cast doubt on the possibility of democratisation in the region. The relationship between a regime’s legitimacy and its interactions with democratisation and authoritarianism offers critical insight. Political legitimacy stems from people’s desire to have their needs met and interests protected. People want the government to provide for them, and if the government does so, they are likely to view it as legitimate. Throughout the 2000s, MENA regimes introduced alleged democratic reforms to gain legitimacy. Rulers claimed the reforms would address specific grievances. Although the reforms were democratic in theory rulers often manipulated them to consolidate power. They used them to secure their rule and ensure the longevity of their regimes, thus rendering legitimacy meaningless, as demonstrated by the cases of Tunisia and Bahrain.
Democratisation plays a vital role as a potential source of personal legitimacy, as citizens trusting the ruler as an individual for new leaders. In Bahrain, Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa came to power in 1999. Initially, he had to compete for power against the Prime Minister, who already had an entrenched power base from the previous regime. Therefore, to be viewed as an equal, Al-Khalifa needed to increase his autonomy by gaining popular support. Additionally, he came to power following an extended uprising from 1994 to 1999 that stemmed from deteriorating socio-economic conditions. Al-Khalifa saw liberal reforms as the best way to defuse these tensions and gain society’s trust. Ben Ali also saw democratisation reforms as a way of gaining trust after coming to power in a bloodless coup in Tunisia in 1987.
Demands for political liberalisation and democratisation characterised the years before the coup, and Ali aimed to consolidate legitimacy by promising the end of single-party rule. Therefore, promises of democratisation served to grant legitimacy by creating a sense of trust in the leader
The strength of a regime is often associated with the strength of its leader,therefore both Ali and Al-Khalifa saw the necessity of creating this trust to establish the foundations of a legitimate regime. Since the new leaders implemented democratic reforms, it initially seemed like they wanted to use them to change state institutions to become more democratic. Al-Khalifa created the National Action Charter in 2000, a document that reaffirmed the regime’s constitutional premise and suggested amendments, including an independent judiciary and a constitutional monarchy. Notably, many of these suggestions stemmed from demands from the previous uprisings, and Al-Khalifa hoped this could help legitimise his rule by proving that he listened to the people. The document was approved in a 2001 national referendum, with an 89% voter turnout and 98.4% voting in favour of the charter. In 2002 the regime officially became a constitutional monarchy, and Al Khalifa’s popularity soared. These two factors show how Al-Khalifa was initially viewed as a legitimate leader.
While Bahrain focused on political reforms, Tunisia prioritised economic reforms. Ali, with support from international lenders, implemented a series of neo-liberalisation reforms. This restructuring of the economy was meant to alleviate high unemployment and poverty, which were two criticisms of the former regime. Both sets of reforms focused on democratising the country, which was evidenced by changing some of its key institutions. The promises of reforms and their intended goals were viewed as legitimate because they sought to address specific grievances previously voiced by the people; however, once implemented, the reforms lost their legitimacy as they failed to introduce democracy. Although the reforms were initially designed to grant legitimacy to the new rulers, the rulers transformed them into a means of consolidating power. When the population voted for the Charter in Bahrain, they only voted on a general idea of reform, not specific policies. This gave the now king free rein to implement his reforms, not the reforms for which people voted. For example, he instituted a bicameral legislature that comprised an elected lower house and an appointed upper house that could veto any decision made by the lower house. The king quickly filled the upper house with regime loyalists. This gave the façade of pluralism, as opposition parties could participate in the legislature, but only bolstered the regime and co- opt the opposition. Ali also shifted Tunisia’s reforms towards regime consolidation throughout the 2000s. Like Bahrain, he established a bicameral legislature via a constitutional amendment in 2002, allowing him to pack an appointed upper house with loyal party members. Additionally, a 2003 law on antiterrorism allowed him to repress autonomous organisations that could oppose the regime. Both rulers altered the purpose of the reforms to give themselves more power, which they believed would ensure the protection of their role and the longevity of their respective regimes.
Despite initially using reforms as a means of personal legitimation, the rulers shifted them away from democratisation to benefit themselves and their supporters. Since the rulers are responsible for derailing the reforms, they are also the ones responsible for maintaining them in the face of decreasing legitimacy. The king accomplished this by weaponising sectarianism. Sectarian divisions in Bahrain were primarily the result of mistrust of the Shia population following the 1979 Iranian Revolution and an attempted Islamist coup in 1981. Bahrain justified the reforms as combating the often-exaggerated threat of a Shia revolution. To prevent Shia from gaining power, the regime naturalised Sunnis from other countries to redress the sectarian imbalance, as Shia were the majority of the population. The state gerrymandered all parliamentary elections so that Sunnis could maintain a majority in the lower house. By keeping the Sunnis in crucial positions of power and stoking fear of a Shia revolt, the regime weaponised sectarianism and incentivised its supporters to want to maintain the status quo, even though the regime was fabricating the threat. While Bahrain favoured co-optation and fear-mongering, Ali relied on his police state as his primary tool of oppression. The clearest example is the response to the 2008 Gafsa mining incident. Frustrated by high unemployment and with the few available job opportunities being given to regime loyalists, the town of Gafsa protested and triggered a revolt. Ali sent in police forces and army units to intervene, and the revolt was brutally suppressed. The actors who implemented reforms to give themselves and their loyalists power needed a way to uphold these reforms. Whether through co-optation or suppression, the reforms and actors lost legitimacy as distrust in the regime caused a decrease in their popularity and acceptance.
Nevertheless, the people can still try to revolt against their regimes to re-gain or create a sense of legitimacy. This was the case for the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, which united the Tunisian population over a shared sense of injustice from regime policies and a desire to end the moral corruption of the regime. Sparked by the self- immolation of a fruit vendor in December 2010, the public finally seemed to reach their boiling point as protests rapidly spread throughout the country.
Having been so focused on consolidating his power and giving benefits to his family, Ali had alienated his natural allies throughout his tenure as president. This meant that when he tried to combat the uprisings, many key institutions turned on him, most notably the military. Few people viewed the regime as legitimate, and few people were willing to defend it, so Ali was ousted and forced into exile, which ushered in a new, pluralist state. Despite difficulties addressing pre-existing problems and creating new institutions, the new state must abide by parliamentary rules and follow a popular mandate. The Tunisian uprising demonstrates even when actors attempt to ignore citizen’s interests, people can still revolt against the regime, thus proving the relevance of legitimacy. The fact that the people demanded democratisation during the protests demonstrates their view of democratisation as a legitimising force, offering insight into why they originally accepted the new leaders and their supposedly democratic reforms.
Even though legitimacy resides with acceptance from the people, this does not mean that they can always combat an illegitimate regime. The mechanisms used to consolidate were also used to protect the regime, at the expense of losing legitimacy. When the people of Bahrain attempted to follow the Tunisian example and revolt against their regime, the king relied on the same tactics to enforce his reforms to quell the uprising. By accusing the uprising of being a hidden Shia revolt, the Sunni military defended the regime to suppress a sectarian threat. Nevertheless, they did not back the regime because they believed it to be legitimate. Instead, they only defended it out of fear. The weaponisation of the sectarian threat was still not enough to curb the uprising. However, the later intervention of troops from Saudi Arabia in favour of the regime led to the end of the uprising, with the regime still in power. Although the people’s revolt was unsuccessful, , the regime is now wholly illegitimate. It lost the ability to rely on its infrastructure, and the people have proven they do not accept it. They can only maintain power through continued reliance on violent repression and the backing of Saudi Arabia. Despite a lack of legitimacy, several regimes, including Bahrain, have a resilient authoritarian character that makes them difficult to overthrow, showcasing how, although legitimacy is important, it is not a determining factor in the survival of a regime. Authoritarian rulers can sometimes sustain themselves as their mechanisms to perpetuate their power have become entrenched in society.
To gain the trust of the people, the ultimate deciders of legitimacy, new authoritarian rulers used the promise of democratisation to gain personal legitimacy when they first came to power. However, they later manipulated these reforms to consolidate power while still giving the façade of democratisation. This created a sense of frustration with the regimes amongst the population, a frustration expressed in the Arab Spring uprisings. In some cases, they could affect change and introduce more legitimate governments.
Nonetheless, people viewing a regime as illegitimate was not always enough to overthrow the regime, proving that legitimacy is not always a deciding factor in a regime’s survival. Although democratisation reforms began as strategies of legitimation, their transformation into attempts to consolidate power meant they did more to preserve authoritarianism than to promote democracy. This showcases how legitimacy is not always a deciding factor in determining a regime’s survival but can play an important role in creating a false sense of trust based on façade democracy, which allows regimes to adapt to a modern world without foregoing authoritarianism.
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