Jul

31

The Face of Elections in Jordan

July 31, 2007 |

I wrote the post below a few days ago but I only had a chance to post it today. The next post will focus more on political issues related to the elections…

Municipal elections are set to be held in Jordan on July 31st, and the campaigning has been in full swing. While my focus should be on the political aspects of this election, this post is mostly about the visual representations of the candidates. They have turned the Jordanian streets into a photo gallery of men in their 40’s and 50’s who stare blankly at you from every street corner, lamp post, store front, and car window. Their supporters have irresponsibly plastered their photo flyers on every surface that the eye can see, without any regard for what the streets will look like after the elections are over and done with. I could not help but try to snap shots of these ugly sites all over the northern town of Irbid where I’m spending most of my vacation. 

Not only did they plaster their photos all over walls, lamp posts, ad screens, and store windows, but they’re also attacking God’s creations and vandalizing trees with their sticky flyers. Ugly white banners hang across the streets as well, but at least those can be removed easily, unlike the sticky flyers that cannot be removed except by forecefully scraping them off surfaces. The flyers will usually remain all over walls and such until the next elections come along where other stickers will be glued on top of them. The genius candidates don’t seem to value quality over quantity, and find the need to paste tens of their photos right next to each other in case we dare to forget their blank stares and their clichéd slogans. I have to give credit to some of them, however, as they pasted their flyers on cardboard pieces and hung them on trees and lamp posts, which can easily be removed after Tuesday’s elections without damaging any surfaces.

Thankfully this isn’t sanctioned by the authorities, but unfortunately, nothing seems to be done to stem this headache inducing visual catastrophe except some weak attempts to tell candidates to not pollute the streets with their flyers. A short piece in Al-Ghad newspaper stated that authorities in Amman “encouraged” everyone to respect the streets and post flyers using good judgment. The piece did not mention any fines that would be placed on those who abused their right to campaign publicly. Also, the article only mentioned the capital Amman, completely ignoring the rest of the country that is littered with these flyers even more than Amman.

Most people don’t even seem to be paying much attention to the flyers. They will follow tribal allegiances to certain candidates and others will refrain from voting because they hear that a certain candidate has the government behind him so there’s not much that their vote can do. The money spent on these flyers would have been much more usefully spent by the candidates on cleaning up streets or holding town hall meetings that encourage all members of the community to speak about their concerns (not just evening tents pitched for men and tribal elders to smoke and talk about soccer). It’s 2007, and I can bet that, sadly, not much has changed since the elections in the 90’s.

 

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