Ready for Their Close-Up: The votes are in, and Islamist parties are ascendant throughout the Arab world. But can they rule?
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The great experiment has begun. In recent days, Arab publics have gone to the polls in Tunisia, Morocco, and Egypt, and to no one’s surprise, Islamist parties have come out on top in each case. Does this mean that Islamists have “hijacked” the revolution? Or that the Arab Spring will become, as Newt Gingrich put it in the Republicans’ foreign-policy debate, an “anti-Christian spring”? The one-word answer is “no.” The three-word answer is “I hope not.”
Tunisia’s al-Nahda party, Morocco’s Justice and Development Party, and Egypt’s Freedom and Justice Party (the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood) are not secular, but they are democratic — or at the very least, they have earned the right to have their democratic bona fides tested in the real world of political practice. They won pluralities because they were the best-organized parties in each country, but also because in the years before the populist upheaval they had come to be seen as forces for social justice in the face of autocratic rule.
They’ve earned their place; but what now? The most pressing question is not about their intentions, pious or otherwise, but about whether they will be permitted to rule at all. In Tunisia, where there is no entrenched rival force, the answer is almost certainly yes. In Morocco, King Mohammed VI promulgated a new constitution to give some authority to the feeble parliament, but he has kept virtually all real power for himself. Last week’s election aroused nothing like the enthusiasm of Tunisia’s or Egypt’s, with turnout a relatively modest 45 percent and large numbers of voters turning in intentionally spoiled ballots. In Egypt, of course, the interim military government, known as the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), has said that it plans to rule until a president is elected, apparently in mid-2012; but Egyptians are increasingly worried that the SCAF will not withdraw even then.