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9 Opposition within the State Governance in Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia Amin Allal and Florian Kohstall Opposition, defined as a force challenging government with the aim and constitutional right to replace it, is scarcely to be found among Middle Eastern regimes. Only in cases like Lebanon and Iran and, more recently, in Palestine, has one governing majority been replaced through another by elections. In most Arab countries, governments have been reinstated by coups d’état or foreign interventions. Of the North African countries, Morocco certainly has the most vigorous opposition. In fact, in 1997, the parties comprising the National Movement attained the formation of an alternance government. Nonetheless, this only occurred within the context of the monarchy’s overarching prerogatives. In Egypt, only the Muslim Brotherhood constitutes a real opposition force. Political parties like the New Wafd Party, the Nasserists, the leftist Tagammu‘, and the newly created al-Ghad (Tomorrow) Party lack popular support and are steadily being weakened by the regime. The Brotherhood certainly has popular support, but it has been maneuvered out of the legal arena.1 In Tunisia , the Islamic al-Nahda Party was the only party to benefit from popular support before it was forced from the domestic political scene, now only surviving abroad. The presidential party Rassemblement Constitutionnel Démocratique (RCD) holds strong control over the Tunisian partisan spectrum (Camau and Geisser 2003) and the few opposition parties. It would not be correct to conclude from this overview that real opposition is absent; opposition should not be addressed exclusively as a factor in regime change. Already in 1988, William Zartman argued that opposition under authoritarian regimes may display functions entirely different from those in democratic regimes.2 Drawing on the Moroccan example, he identified opposition parties as “ghost-writers” of the king’s government (Zartman 1988). More recent studies focus on the institutions and mechanisms established by authoritarian rulers in order to control opposition. Elections in Egypt’s 182 / Amin Allal and Florian Kohstall multiparty system are a tool to feed the patron-client relations between the governing National Democratic Party (NDP) and the legal opposition parties (Kassem 1999). More generally speaking, structures of contestation—a set of rules specific to each country—channel and structure the behavior of the opposition and account for regime stability (Lust-Okar 2004). Taking together these arguments, we may in fact conclude that opposition is a pillar of authoritarian rule (Albrecht 2005). In this chapter, we build on these arguments in order to analyze the role of opposition under authoritarian rule, with explicit attention to the international context. Not only governmental and nongovernmental agencies are invested in the state; international agencies also have a stake. In the context of increasing pressure for reform and the diffusion of good governance as the accepted instrument for reform, opposition in a wider sense is not only a ghostwriter but also a tool for authoritarian governments to enhance international cooperation. Opposition may not explicitly support the state, but it can be considered as a part of the state when it participates in the development process. Under current circumstances, authoritarian regimes cannot survive without allowing at least a minimum degree of pluralism in order to channel domestic unrest and external demands. Despite their resistance to the third wave of democratization, Arab states are not isolated from their environment. Rather, they are subject to current trends of international harmonization. The emerging governance agenda of the international aid community constitutes a major challenge for the state in Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco, three authoritarian regimes that rely heavily on international support.3 While the quality of governance is still rated low for all three countries,4 the participatory approach—one important component of the governance agenda—is being applied increasingly in reform processes. Commissions and committees are set up in order to integrate stakeholders into the decision-making process and to build a consensus on sensitive policy issues. Egypt’s National Human Rights Council and Morocco’s Justice and Reconciliation Commission stand out as particularly prominent examples for the demonstration of the goodwill of authoritarian leaders in confronting their own legacy and creating spaces of expression for former regime prisoners. Other commissions, committees, and conferences have been organized in order to address development issues like health, education, and decentralized government. They integrate local representatives of NGOs that are directly active on the ground. In so doing, Arab states prove that they are not an exception to the worldwide spread of the type of governance that is advocated...

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