Jordan averts immediate crisis but a difficult road lies ahead
Jordan is embarking on painful economic measures to close gap in its yawning public debt
The reversal last week of a deeply unpopular tax law appeared to defuse days of mass protests in the Jordanian capital, Amman, but out in the provinces, Rami Fawri was not impressed.
“Are we supposed to clap?” asked Fawri, a 40-year-old owner of a stationery shop in Salt, a hilltop city west of Amman. “They want me to forget what they did to me before? No, I remember, I remember the prices went up. We are suffocating.”
Jordan is known for its relative stability in an often-tumultuous region, and US officials looked on with concern last week as this key Middle Eastern ally faced its largest street protests since the Arab Spring unrest of 2011.
The introduction of the new tax law proved too much for many Jordanians struggling with price hikes amid stagnant economic growth. Demonstrations that had been bubbling in provincial cities like Salt for months spread to central Amman, drawing a wide crosssection of Jordanians. They chanted for the prime minister and his government to be sacked and for the law to be reversed, and they got it.
But while Jordan’s King Abdullah appears to have averted an immediate crisis, he faces a difficult road ahead as he balances the need to address the country’s economic woes with the demands of an emboldened population.
“People have discovered that they have power which they didn’t know they had before,” said Labib Kamhawi, a prominent political analyst and government critic.
Jordan is embarking on a three-year programme of painful economic measures ordered up by the International Monetary Fund to help the kingdom cut its yawning public debt. In Salt, demonstrations began in February after the government eliminated subsidies on bread, doubling prices.
Living costs in Jordan are already among the highest in the Middle East, and incomes have not kept up. Unemployment is at 18 per cent. Fuel prices are more than 50 per cent higher than in the United States.
Adding to the economic stress are at least 650,000 recent Syrian refugees, on top of a population that includes millions of Palestinians whose ancestors were displaced from their homes long ago.
Largely devoid of natural resources, Jordan survives in large part on handouts. While the Trump administration has slashed aid elsewhere, the United States has pledged more money to Jordan, which shares a 150 mile-long border with Israel and is a hub for thousands of US troops.
Ordinary Jordanians complain they have become the country’s new chequebook through their taxes, while graft and fiscal waste are allowed to continue among the political elite.
In the short term, all eyes are on the new prime minister Omar Razzaz, a Harvard-educated economist who previously worked for the World Bank and most recently held the position of education minister.