Regime Crisis and Political Liberalisation Answers: The Search for Re-Legitimation in North African and Middle Eastern Contexts

Even though authoritarian persistence is a dominant trend in the political contexts of Middle Eastern and North African countries, since the beginning of the Third Wave (Huntington 1996) there have been some bags of political change and reform in these countries, namely through the adoption of practices and institutions of democratic nature, but aiming at different functions and processes (Gandhi e Przeworski, 2007). The process of political liberalisation or pluralisation (Hinnesbusch 2000), must be seen as an opposite or a surrogate to the process of democratization, as a survival strategy developed by the incumbent leader when facing a regime crisis, whenever he believes the power structure of the regime will not be affected (O’Donnell and Schmitter, 1986). When faced with a regime crisis, authoritarian elites react either by repression or by introducing measures of political liberalization (Przeworski, 1991), in order to reinforce its stability and legitimacy and to decrease the internal or external pressure over the regime. We consider a regime crisis whenever the regime elite perceives a threat to its stability, whether it is motivated by domestic or by international challenges. Therefore, it is important to understand the pace of change and what do the processes of political liberalization represent, what drives authoritarian leaders to introduce the processes and mechanisms of reform and to what extent these have contributed ensure the persistence of authoritarian rulers in power and to the modernization of the authoritarian system. Thus, the focus of this paper is to analyse the relationship between the type of regime crisis and the type of political liberalization, seeking to understand the way authoritarian institutions accommodate reform in political liberalisation contexts and how these are used by the authoritarian leader to reconsolidate its power and reinforce its discourse of legitimisation using the cases of Morocco, Egypt and Jordan.