Published by
Al-Araby
Al-Araby
For more than two decades, Jordanian opposition parties and political activists have been calling on King Abdullah II to pave the way for the introduction of parliamentary governments instead of royally appointed ones, as has been the case since the 1950s. Jordan’s 1952 constitution, one of the most liberal in the Arab world, defines the political system in the kingdom as parliamentary with a hereditary monarchy. Constitutional jurists point to the fact that the king exercises his powers through a council of ministers and that he is not accountable. But since the mid-1950s, when Jordan had its…