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What Arab democrats want is…

What do Arab democrats want from the next U.S. President? The next Administration should address Arab youth’s demographic predominance, support local democrats’ home-grown efforts, and tailor country-specific democratization efforts to reflect the region’s diversity and ensure that democracy delivers socio-economic benefits in ordinary people’s lives.

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What do Arab democrats want from the next U.S. President? The next Administration should address Arab youth’s demographic predominance, support local democrats’ home-grown efforts, and tailor country-specific democratization efforts to reflect the region’s diversity and ensure that democracy delivers socio-economic benefits in ordinary people’s lives.

These are the top-lines of a recent dialogue organized by the Washington Institute’s Project Fikra. Some 63 percent of the Middle East population is under 25, notes Mohamed Abdelbaky is foreign affairs editor for Akher Saa, and a visiting fellow with Human Rights First. Radical extremism offers an outlet to disaffected youth “in a world where secularism and civil society are either weak, nonexistent, or offer few opportunities for political expression and personal development.” 

The region’s activists are impatient with the inconsistent approach of external actors, says Oussama Safa , general director of the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies, a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy.  ”Democracy promotion efforts should not adopt a short-term perspective; rather, they should incorporate long-term political, economic, and social indicators designed by the reformers in the region.”   

“Arab democrats are becoming extinct, struggling to survive in the narrow passage between autocratic governments, on the one side, and Islamists, on the other,” according to Engi El-Haddad cofounder of Shayfeen.com, the Afro-Egyptian Human Rights Organization, and Egyptians Against Corruption. Engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood will “seriously undercut” Arab democrats and give credibility to the Islamists who lack the democratic traits of inclusiveness and transparency. 

A closer focus on the rule of law and reform of governing institutions, he contends, would help nurture the “necessary politically moderate alternative to a potentially violent and protracted power vacuum effected when autocratic regimes eventually exit the political scene.”

Democracy promotion is an interaction of values and ideologies that must take both the international and the Arab context into account,” suggests Nader Said, president of Arab World for Research and Development. He believes that the “aid bureaucracy” has harmed democracy promotion, “diverting money away from the actual programs on the ground and toward centralized administrative offices far away from the programs’ officers and intended recipients.”