The Quiet Demise of Jordan’s Political Space

In the shadow of Gaza’s destruction, the Jordanian regime has quietly repressed one of the main sources of the country’s political activism.

By Elizabeth K. Parker-Magyar

August 2025

On July 17, with little fanfare, Jordan’s Constitutional Court issued a long-anticipated, legally complex decision that effectively outlawed the national teachers’ union. Nearly five years after a broad crackdown on the organization led to the group’s suspension and the imprisonment of its leaders, the Court declared the 2011 law establishing the union unconstitutional. The ruling — overshadowed by images of starvation in Gaza and violence in southern Syria, both 150 miles in either direction from Jordan’s capital city, Amman — drew little notice, even in regional media.

But the long-rumored decision nevertheless constitutes a poignant end to an important chapter in Jordan’s political history and underscores the broader closure of political space in the country. Most notably, however, the relatively muted response to the decision is a sign of enormous political transformation in the region amid the destruction in Gaza. In the decade following the Arab Spring (2010–11), political mobilization in Jordan often centered on socioeconomic issues, even when they intersected directly with the politics of Jordan’s “cold peace” with Israel. But while socioeconomic grievances remain central within Jordanian political life, the scale of attention, outrage, and mobilization directed toward Gaza has rendered secondary many of the animating controversies of the post–Arab Spring years.

A Loud Decade of Teacher Activism

Although the current iteration of the teachers’ union was born out of the street protests before and during the Arab Spring, there is a longer history of teachers organizing in Jordan. In the spring of 2010, as part of a broader uptick in labor organizing across the Middle East, a handful of teachers in a West Amman public school announced a meeting to “revive” a union that had been suspended in 1957, when Jordan entered a forty-year period of martial law. While professional groups such as doctors, engineers, and pharmacists had regained organizing rights by the 1970s, teachers remained barred from reconstituting their union despite their repeated mobilization.

A similar dynamic appeared set to play out in 2010, as the burgeoning teachers’ movement organized widespread strikes concentrated in the nation’s restive southern governorates. When the government retaliated that summer by forcing several leading activists into early retirement, teachers staged a four-day march from Amman to the southern town of Karak, successfully securing the reinstatement of those activists. By uniting oft-divided political communities, teachers scored what Jordanian anthropologist Ahmed Abu Khalil later described as a “unifying breakthrough.” But the following November, the nation’s highest court reiterated a 1990s-era determination that teachers, as a professional group made up mostly of public-sector workers, were not constitutionally entitled to organizing rights.

When the Arab Spring arrived in Jordan weeks later, in January 2011, those same schoolteachers were well positioned to seize their moment. Already organized, the teachers were among the first activist groups in the streets. They launched an open-ended strike on March 20 that for the first time reached schools in the capital city and neighboring Zarqa. Four days later, as the demonstrations in Jordan reached their apex following the death of a protester, the high court overturned its November 2010 decision, paving the way for the long-sought union. Teachers suspended their strike the next day. On 14 July 2011, Parliament ratified a new law institutionalizing the union — the same one that would be declared unconstitutional this July. Amid a package of reforms that established the Constitutional Court, a new electoral commission, and an anticorruption body, the teachers’ union is often remembered as a principal concession of the Arab Spring in Jordan.

In subsequent years, however, the union became more internally divided and externally divisive. Mirroring the polarization between Islamists and opposition actors seen throughout the Middle East, some early teacher-activists chafed at the disproportionate influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in a body they say it had played a limited role in establishing. Influential figures such as Mustafa Rawashdeh, the current minister of culture who led the 2011 movement and served as the union’s first president before entering Parliament, became vocal critics of what they described as the Brotherhood’s consistent overreach and dominance in the group. Although the teachers’ union staged meaningful strikes in 2012 and 2014, sociologist Ahmad Al Sholi lamented the union’s journey from a “protesting birth to bureaucratic suicide” as “easily exploited” divisions around identity — Islamist or secularist, Jordanian or Palestinian — threatened to subsume teachers’ initial socioeconomic demands.

That perspective shifted once again in early 2019, when teachers elected a far more confrontational union council: Ahmad Hajaya, an activist from the southern district of Tafilah often linked to the tribal Hirak opposition movements, was elected president; Nasser Nawasreh, a Muslim Brotherhood figure from Jerash, became deputy-president; and Ghalib Abu Qudeis, a teacher from East Amman who had played a central role in the 2010 movement, and Kifah Abu Farhan, a teacher from the nation’s largest Palestinian refugee camp with roots in Palestinian leftist movements, both became council members.

Almost immediately, Hajaya and these new council members put forward a plan to secure a broad salary increase they said had first been agreed to in 2014. Spurred forward by Hajaya’s tragic death in a car accident and images of teachers being tear-gassed at a protest in central Amman just days prior to the start of the school year, union leadership launched an open-ended strike that succeeded in closing every public school in the country for four full weeks.

Even as Jordan’s monarch repeatedly called for mediation, the extent and length of the closures shocked political observers. With slogans like “We’ll eat together or we’ll starve together,” the teachers connected their strike with grievances around economic liberalization and rising inequality and, in the words of prominent commentator Mohammed Abu Rumman, “succeeded in dictating their conditions and achieving a sweeping victory symbolically, politically, and economically.” Like the teachers’ mobilization of the early 2010s, this time around it again extended well beyond the boundaries of political groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the tribal movements that are often at the forefront of activism in Jordan.

The government and the teachers’ union reached a deal in October, and as part of the settlement, teachers won a 35 percent raise. But their victory would be short-lived, as the government sought to freeze salaries amid the financial crunch at the outset of the covid-19 pandemic. After union leadership continued calls to escalate throughout the summer of 2020, Jordan’s government initiated a widespread crackdown, suspending the union for two years, arresting its leadership council, closing the union’s offices, placing a gag order on any domestic reporting on the union, and subsequently arresting hundreds of teachers at answering protests.

This level of repression and countermobilization was deeply unusual for the “image-conscious” Jordanian regime — with its treatment of teachers often cited as primary evidence of the closing political space in the broader ecosystem of the country’s social and labor movements. In 2022 and 2023, after the leadership of the teachers’ union had won or settled the court cases launched against it — including on charges that its donation to the nation’s covid-relief fund constituted financial mismanagement — teachers staged recurring, smaller-scale protests calling for the reconstitution of the organization and elections for new leadership. In doing so, they often appealed to the freedoms of association and representation within the bounds of Jordan’s broader “political modernization” efforts. Some observers, however, especially in the Gulf, framed the regime’s crackdown on the union as part of a wider, overdue confrontation between the Jordanian government and the Muslim Brotherhood — what Abu Rumman at the time termed the “Brotherhoodization” of the issue.

Politics Post–October 7

Since the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel and the ensuing war, Jordan’s attention and politics have largely refocused on Gaza, where credible estimates suggest that Israel’s military campaign has killed at least 58,000 Palestinians. In a survey taken in the early months of the war, 72 percent of Jordanians described the onslaught as either “genocide” (44 percent) or “massacre” (28 percent). From a distance, Jordan has been spared the violence and instability that have reshaped much of the Middle East, from the weakening of Hezbollah following Israel’s invasion of Lebanon to the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. During the twelve-day conflict between Israel and Iran last month, Jordanians awoke constantly to air-raid sirens as thousands of Iranian missiles were intercepted over Jordanian airspace.

But away from the battlegrounds and off the social-media feeds, Jordan’s domestic politics has also undergone profound shifts. As Israeli politicians and the U.S. president continually resurface the idea of “transferring” Gaza’s population to Egypt and Jordan, and amid escalating violence in the West Bank, Jordanian political activism has consolidated around antinormalization protests that target deeply unpopular trade and diplomatic agreements between Jordan and Israel and demand the abrogation of the 1994 peace treaty between the two countries.

The Muslim Brotherhood, which has long called for the end of the treaty, rode this wave of discontent to better-than-expected results in last September’s parliamentary elections, which introduced a stronger role for political parties in the Jordanian Parliament. The Brotherhood’s political wing, the Islamic Action Front (IAF), dominated a newly introduced competition for a set of national-level, closed-list seats, winning nearly 45 percent of that vote after campaigning explicitly on Gaza. Among the new IAF parliamentarians is Nasser Nawasreh, the firebrand former deputy president of the teachers’ union who, along with other prominent IAF parliamentarians, has remained one of the most visible public figures pressing for the union’s reinstatement.

In April 2025, however, Jordan joined allies Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates in formally outlawing the Muslim Brotherhood after announcing that Jordanian authorities had foiled an extremist plot linked to the group. While investigations into the Brotherhood continue — and IAF parliamentarians retain their seats — the ban fundamentally resets the relationship between the regime and its oldest opposition group. If the Brotherhood ban in Jordan represents a political earthquake, it is tempting to see the official closure of the teachers’ union only months later as one of its attendant aftershocks.

But the Court’s decision to foreclose the union’s return also reflects a paradigmatic shift in the contours of Jordanian political participation. In the nationally representative Arab Barometer survey conducted between 2023 and 2024, 21 percent of Jordanians reported participation in street protests and demonstrations, up from 2 percent in the 2022 survey. But the nature of these protests has changed, as data from the Armed Conflict Location and Events Dataset (ACLED) show. Labor activism (including teachers) constituted up to 71 percent of the thousands of protests documented in Jordan between 2016 and 7 October 2023. It was on the back of this head-turning popular mobilization, often forcing the government to the negotiating table, that teachers won their union in 2011 and their salary hike in 2019.

Since the start of the war in Gaza, 78 percent of the 661 Jordanian protests tallied by ACLED have centered on Gaza and the politics of Jordan’s relations with Israel. Teacher activism, like labor protests more broadly, has taken a backseat. While analysts attribute some of this decline to Jordan’s shrinking political arena, many labor movements and organizations have also concentrated their efforts on solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. In 2025, the quiet response to the Constitutional Court’s decision to outlaw the teachers’ union reflects a contemporary reality in Jordanian political life: As the destruction and starvation in Gaza dominate headlines, slogans like “We’ll eat together, or we’ll starve together” carry new meaning.

Elizabeth K. Parker-Magyar is assistant professor of political science at Yale University. She was previously the Moulay Hicham Alaoui Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard University Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

Copyright © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy

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