Elections won’t improve the Middle East, good governance will

Elections are like London buses: You wait impatiently for one to turn up and then a whole fleet arrives at once. This year we have already seen Egypt’s latest presidential election, and in May we’ll have parliamentary elections in Iraq and Lebanon. There should also be parliamentary and municipal elections in Bahrain, municipal elections in Tunisia — the first since 2011 — and provincial elections across Iraq, including in Kirkuk for the first time in a decade. I’m not holding my breath but we may also see elections of some sort in Libya and new parliamentary elections in the Kurdistan Regional Government.
This is surely good news. Elections are the life blood of democracy and democracy, after all, is what we all want. Isn’t it?
That was certainly the lesson many people drew from the events of 2011 to 2013 in the Arab world, when autocrats fell, domestic politics opened up and they saw — or thought they saw — a thousand flowers blooming on the streets of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen. If things subsequently became more complicated, then this simply meant the need for democracy was even more urgent.
I have a lot of sympathy with this view. I saw a lot of these events up close and personal and I have no doubt that people in the region want a say in who governs them and, more importantly, how they do so. In particular, they want an end to corruption and to be able to hold their leaders accountable in some way for their promises and their ability to deliver real improvements in their daily lives and hope for the future.
The problem lies in believing that elections are necessarily the way to ensure all this happens. And this goes to the heart of the problem. There have been elections of various sorts in the Middle East and North Africa for decades — in Egypt since the 1920s and patchily elsewhere since the 1930s. But elections have been no guarantee of good governance, and in some ways the reverse.
We can see this clearly when we consider the recent history of elections in Lebanon and Iraq. In Lebanon, the distribution of political authority continues to be decided not in the polling booth but in the deals cooked up beforehand between the main blocs. These reflect sectarian and communal organizational power rather than the considered and collective judgment of ordinary people. Even with the new electoral law, we will again see the major Shiite, Sunni and Maronite blocs dominating particular geographical areas and the ultimate allocation of seats.

The basis of democracy is a sustained, structural and effectively intermediated relationship between the governed and those who govern.

Sir John Jenkins

In Iraq, there is a long history of bad electoral faith and sharp practices. Former Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, put in place in 2006 by a backroom deal, lost the 2010 popular vote to Iyad Allawi. But Al-Maliki hung on to power through a series of squalid and secretive machinations involving the then chief justice, the US, Iran and some factions of the Kurds, who all had different motives but came to the same conclusion: Better the devil they knew. That was a disastrous decision, but it was driven by a sense that elections were simply an opening bid, not the final word. The real game lay elsewhere.
We saw similar turns of events from 2012 in Libya and Tunisia, with superficially different results but ultimately the same outcome: The absence of any serious attempt to grapple with real national needs for reconciliation, reconstruction and social equity.
And this illustrates a great truth: Elections are the end of a process of political development, not the beginning. In many ways, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak were far more democratic in the sense of holding frequent elections than Gamal Abdel Nasser. But the results were never in doubt; they were the product not of the free decisions of voters but of deals struck in advance in order to create a theater of democratic choice for the world to admire.
Iraq is in many ways the country that needs a real reconnection of rulers and ruled more than any other in the region. It is striking how many hopes the key external players in the West are investing in Prime Minister Haider Abadi winning again. Partly this is in order to avoid Al-Maliki making a comeback. Abadi has done some good things, including seeking to rebuild Iraq’s relations with the Arab states of the Gulf. But, in the current electoral campaign, there is no discussion of a vision for the country (apart, interestingly enough, from the occasional intervention by Muqtada Al-Sadr).
Elections are not the main issue; good governance is. This is emphatically not an argument about democracy or its alternatives, it is an argument about where we start. Underlying good governance means administrative efficiency, education, tolerance, social justice and the rule of law. And these, not the outer trappings of electoral process, are the things on which we should collectively focus. Otherwise the cycle of conflict, repression, stagnation and the exploitation of national politics for their own purposes by outside actors will continue.
The late, great philosopher Ernest Gellner once said that nations did not produce nationalism: Nationalism produced nations. Form follows content. In the same way, elections do not produce democracy: Democratic habits produce elections.
The basis of democracy is a sustained, structural and effectively intermediated relationship between the governed and those who govern. It can take many forms. The purpose is to improve governance — that’s the bus we’ve been waiting for all these years.

• Sir John Jenkins is a senior fellow at Policy Exchange. He was the British ambassador to Saudi Arabia until January 2015.