On the Gulf: Plutocrats, Tribals, Islamists, et al…….

A political tug of war has been going on in Kuwait. It is essentially a struggle for power between an elected parliament and unelected plutocrats of the merchant families. It is also a struggle for the economic pie.

The plutocrats, the merchant families who control businesses and the media, are pushing for adoption of sweeping packages of major construction projects. They would get the contracts and the benefits from these contracts, and they are salivating at the prospect. This would not benefit the other classes much since the plutocrats usually import cheap labor from Asia and Egypt rather than hire locally. A plutocrat family usually has one or two of its sons manage a multitude of imported cheap labor and a few imported white-collars: that is how they run their businesses.

Parliament, now mostly representing tribal elements and middle to lower classes, is pushing, part of it is pushing, for direct support for the debt-ridden consumers, their voters, rather than to the business classes. They are holding up government projects that would benefit the plutocrats until the consumer issue is resolved.

The merchant classes used to be considered the “liberal” classes of Kuwait, but that was way back then. Now they are “liberal” in the sense that they support more opening of the economy and making it a competitor to places like Dubai. That also happens to benefit them mostly. But they have shifted away from their old “liberal” support for elected democracy in order to preserve the old political influence of their class. In the past few years they have pushed for reducing the number of electoral districts, with the goal of reducing the influence of tribal and Islamist elements. They got the districts reduced from 25 to only 5. Still, the tribal-Islamist alliance won. Now they are calling for making the whole country one single district. I doubt that will change things. Demographics are against the plutocrats. The old merchant families are few and they tend to intermarry among themselves, which does not make for a growing political base. Once the tribes discovered the joys and the power of the electoral process, the political goose of the plutocrats was cooked.

More recently the plutocrats have formed among themselves a Group of 26 that has sought to directly influence policy, through lobbying the ruling family. Some are hinting in their media of the need for suspending the constitution and allowing a period of “suspended democracy” in order to pass major legislation through an unelected cabinet. This has been picked up and eagerly adopted by the Saudi media, never supporters of electoral democracy in the Gulf region, or in the larger Arab region.

Kuwait went through two periods of suspended democracy, essentially unconstitutional rule. Both had disastrous consequences. They were characterized by major corruption scandals that did not come to light until after constitutional rule was restored and the media freed from censorship. The last one ended with the Iraqi invasion of 1990.

The goal this time will probably be an interregnum during which the electoral system can be changed. Most likely some will opt for the Bahraini solution, whereby the monarch appoints a second assembly of his choosing that would dilute the powers of the elected one. That appointed assembly will automatically be dominated by the plutocrats who cannot win many elections these days.

But how can the constitution be changed without the consent of an elected assembly? That in itself would be unconstitutional. Besides, suspending the constitution is unconstitutional, by definition.

A dilemma, n’est-ce pas?

Cheers

Mohammed