INTRODUCTION
The fall of Mubarak in Egypt opened the door to political pluralism and a considerable number of parties participated in the 2012 legislative elections—the first free and fair electoral contest in the country since its independence—including a number of Salafi ones. To the surprise of many, the newly created Salafi al-Nour party performed extremely well. In addition to al-Nour, other Salafi political parties were formed and competed. A similar situation developed in Tunisia where three Salafi parties were established after the revolution (Torelli, Merone, and Cavatorta Reference Torelli, Merone and Cavatorta2012). In Yemen too, a Salafi party was established with the aim of participating in the post-Saleh elections (Kuschnitzki Reference Kuschnitzki, Cavatorta and Merone2017).
The participation of Salafis in institutional politics was unexpected because the vast majority of Salafis subscribe to the quietist tradition, whereby their focus is on religious learning and education, charitable work, and proselytizing—not politics and most certainly not institutional politics in a democratic or democratizing setting (Meijer Reference Meijer2009). The traditional relationship between Salafism and institutional politics has in fact usually been one of mutual separation, whereby Salafis do not question the ruler (as long as he is a Muslim) and shun institutional politics and political parties, which they consider as inherently divisive. According to the dominant tradition, Salafis should therefore focus only on religious matters, promoting and “living” through da'wa, a very conservative lifestyle based on a literal interpretation of the sacred texts (Amghar Reference Amghar2007). Charitable work is of course part of traditional Salafism as well. However, Wiktorowicz (Reference Wiktorowicz2006) shows that there are Salafis who take a different approach to the relationship with politics. The ones that have become familiar to Western audiences are jihadi-Salafis whose political objective—the creation of an Islamic state where a strict version of sharia is applied—is to be attained through violence (Gerges, Reference Gerges2016), which quietist Salafis reject. There are also a number of Salafis who argue that engagement in institutional politics through the creation of political parties is crucial if the Islamic state is to be created given that there are a number of ideological rivals that can take advantage of the political system to side-line Salafism and, worse, undermine religion (al-Anani and Malik Reference al-Anani and Malik2013). Despite the existence of this “political” current within Salafism, avowedly Salafi parties were very rare before the Arab uprisings and the “politicos” represented a marginal group.
As the cases of Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen demonstrate, the 2011 revolts radically changed the outlook of many Salafis. In their desire to respond to the challenge of people's power and the changes taking place following the fall of autocratic regimes, a growing number of Salafis became increasingly interested in political participation in the countries that had opened up their political system (Lacroix Reference Lacroix2016; Cavatorta and Merone Reference Cavatorta and Merone2017). Salafi parties stood for elections in Egypt and Tunisia, thus following the example of their Kuwaiti counterpart. Yemeni Salafis also created a political party, but the failed transition to democracy and the descent into civil war did not allow the party to “test” its popularity in democratic elections. Salafis have also flirted with participation in elections in Morocco, albeit through individual candidates rather than through a political party.
This turn in the relationship between Salafism and politics raises questions about its current nature and how this could influence the national polities in which Salafi parties operate. Salafi participation in the post-uprisings process of democratic institutionalization does not speak to a real commitment to the democratic project, implying a dramatic change in Salafi positions regarding politics and democracy. In fact, Salafis are quite clearly opposed to democratic politics, particularly when this is equated with liberal-democracy. At the same time, Salafi participation is not simply and only about the instrumental use of the political openings the transitions brought about to infiltrate the public debate to spread the Salafi message and undermine the nascent democracy. In fact, Salafi political participation has implications for broader prospects of democratization in the region and, more specifically, for the moderation-through-inclusion hypothesis. This hypothesis holds that anti-systemic and un-democratic radical political actors can progressively moderate their stances and accept the game of democracy as they increasingly participate in institutional politics where they are confronted with a plurality of political views and where rules constrain their behavior and shape their electoral strategies. In short, they begin to moderate because they implicitly accept the rules of the democratic game, although they might reject them rhetorically. Such actors become involved in every-day politicking and compromising, learning the “give and take” aspect of democratic politics, which over time weakens their radical resolve. The inclusion-moderation hypothesis has been tested for some time on traditional Islamist parties issued from the Muslim Brothers and some scholars attempted to indirectly apply the framework to Salafi parties as well (Utvik Reference Utvik2014; Gurses Reference Gurses2014; Kurzman and Türkoğlu Reference Kurzman and Türkoğlu2015). The problem with the moderation-inclusion hypothesis is that the concept of moderation is fuzzy and relational. This means that it is difficult to gauge how committed to democratization radical and rhetorically anti-democracy parties are and how their commitment might change as democratization progresses. Rather, this article looks at voter–party linkages to analyze if and how such parties can be actors in the democratization process. Building on the literature on voter–party linkages and on Zollner's (Reference Zollner2019) work on the relationship between Islamist parties and their mother organizations (Islamist social movements), this article looks at whether Salafi parties made tentative and somewhat unconscious moves toward the acceptance of political pluralism when participating in post-uprsings politics. While theories regarding the role of radical actors in electoral processes exist, the case of Salafi parties is not as well suited to test hypotheses about their role because there is still limited empirical knowledge about them, having only participated in elections very rarely. The article thus offers a thick description of how such parties have operated in a democratizing context and puts forth a framework that might help explaining their choices and behavior. More specifically, the article contributes to this debate through the analysis of the economic policy proposals Salafi parties put forth.
The economic policy-making aspect of Salafi politics has been largely overlooked, and in this article, we analyze it to shed light on what Salafi-proposed economic policies tell us about the commitment to the institutional setting and to the democratic project. First, given the considerable saliency of economic issues in triggering the revolts (Teti, Abbott, and Cavatorta Reference Teti, Abbott and Cavatorta2019), the analysis of Salafis' economic programs will account for their understanding of the actual problems affecting ordinary citizens and their engagement in elaborating a credible economic plan. More importantly, it will reveal the kind of party–voter linkage Salafi parties rely on or seek. Second, such hermeneutical effort testifies their potential intention in relaxing or even cutting ties with the constellation of civil society organizations from which they originate, thus renouncing the so-called Islamists advantage (Cammett and Jones Luong Reference Cammett and Jones Luong2014). These two dimensions are crucial in revealing the potential of newly formed Salafi parties to become veritable intermediate institutions underpinning the functioning of a democratic regime, as the one that the post-uprising elections in Tunisia and Egypt meant to build.
HOW SALAFISTS' ECONOMIC PROPOSALS SPEAK OF THEIR PARTY–VOTERS LINKAGE AND PARTY INSTITUTIONALIZATION
In Tunisia and Egypt, the democratic openings of 2011–2013 offered Salafis the unique opportunity to mobilize politically and have a say in the process of post-uprising institution-building. In spite of the early hesitations, parties stemming from Salafi movements and organizations arose in both countries. Some of them did not manage to gain legalization in time for participating in the first legislative elections, as in the case of Tunisia, but others, like the Egyptian al-Nour, became major players of the transition and even survived al-Sisi's ban on Islamist political parties following the July 2013 military coup. Whatever their electoral fortunes, the meaning and the effects of such electoral participation can be seen as an opportunistic move to infiltrate state institutions, or as a sign of potential moderation and pragmatic acceptance of democratic procedures, or a mix of both given the heterogeneous Salafi thinking about democracy and political participation (Anjum Reference Anjum2016).
Building on previous work on Islamist parties, the inclusion-moderation hypothesis has been the driving framework to understand the choice of electoral participation on the part of Salafis. The hypothesis was first elaborated to explain the gradual abandonment of radical anti-system positions Communist parties in post-World War II Western Europe had, notably in France and Italy. The same logic informed studies on Islamist parties' participation in electoral politics in the 1990s and 2000s (El Ghobsahy Reference El-Ghobashy2005; Clark Reference Clark2006; Schwedler Reference Schwedler2006; Allani Reference Allani2009; Karakaya and Yildirim Reference Karakaya and Yildirim2013; Gurses Reference Gurses2014). In its mainstream formulation, the hypothesis states that the involvement of anti-systemic parties in electoral politics triggers a process of moderation because of the need to compete for votes, inevitably accepting first and foremost the rules of the democratic game. Since it entails the gradual abandonment of anti-systemic positions and the implicit legitimation of the game being played by the simple act of playing it, the inclusion-moderation process has been seen, with rare exceptions (Cavatorta and Merone Reference Cavatorta and Merone2013; Resta Reference Resta2019), as a gateway to democratization. From this, it follows that Salafi involvement in electoral politics after the uprisings could be interpreted as a sign of their acceptance of the rules of electoral democracy despite the rhetorical stance against it. However, acceptance to play by the rules of the game—namely behavioral moderation—does not necessarily translate into real commitment to it, which has to do with ideological moderation. Indeed, much of the confusion surrounding the concept of moderation derives from the fact that this is a context-dependent concept: all depends on where electoral participation occurs. If, as initially observed for communist parties in established Western democracies, elections sustain a democratic regime, then moderation implies the acceptance of the procedures and the core contents of liberal democracy. If, however, elections are a pillar of electoral autocracies, as was the case in many Arab regimes, it is hard to see how the experience of the “menu of manipulation” (Schedler Reference Schedler2002) authoritarian regimes offer might infuse democratic learning (Gurses Reference Gurses2014; Resta Reference Resta2019).
In accordance with these different understandings of moderation, different readings on the meaning of Salafi participation in politics have been provided. Those opting for a relational definition of moderation—measured through the ideological distance with other parties (Sartori Reference Sartori1976)—have either found considerable polarization between Salafi and other parties (Cross and Sorens Reference Cross and Sorens2016) or noted instead that the absence of ideological polarization that comes with moderation is by no means conducive to democratization (Somer Reference Somer2014; Resta Reference Resta2019). The same inconsistency arises also when the substantive meaning of moderation is adopted and scholars answer to this research question by directly looking at Salafis' political programs (Gurses Reference Gurses2014). Using the Egyptian case study, Ranko and Nedza (Reference Ranko and Nedza2016) see in Salafi political programs a process of ideological approximation with other parties, particularly mainstream Islamists. Pushing further this argument, some speak of the “Ikhwanization of the Salafis” (Utvik Reference Utvik2014) and see Salafi parties following the same political trajectory the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) followed; a trajectory that saw the Brothers embrace democratic procedures and civil–political rights. The reluctance of Salafi parties to recognize the value of democracy and political pluralism pushed other scholars to caution against such optimism (Gurses Reference Gurses2014) because there is no ideological moderation to speak of.
The inclusion-moderation hypothesis is therefore limited when it comes to connect how anti-systemic parties can become actors in the democratization process. Research strategies that only rely on Salafi proposals on how to organize the state, regime, and society are useful, but they are also too broad. Focusing instead on specific policy proposals and notably economic ones can speak at the same time to party–voter linkage and to the degree of party institutionalization, which are reliable indicators of parties' commitment to political engagement and their impact on the process of democratization (Kitschelt et al. Reference Kitschelt, Mansfeldova, Markowski and Tóka1999).
Party–voter linkage is the strategy party elites pursue to create a connection with the electoral base. In his seminal work, Kitschelt (Reference Kitschelt1995) distinguishes between programmatic, clientelistic, and charismatic linkages. The first denotes parties' search for votes on the basis of the policy package they promise to enact once elected. The second is the quest for votes in exchange for direct material rewards. The third is parties looking for votes by relying on the charisma of its leader. To these categories, more recent studies are inclined to add the category of identity party–voter linkage that is underpinned, for instance, by religious, linguistic, or ethnic factors. However, not all types of party–voter linkages have the same effect on the process of democratization. In fact, only the programmatic linkage seems to have a special relationship with it. As Kitschelt posits, programmatic strategies provide “a rational motivation for citizens’ participation in elections and thus a rational justification of the democratic rules of the game” while the remnants categories “have a tendency to make democratic competition look irrelevant or irrational from the perspective of deliberating voters” (Reference Kitschelt1995, 450). From this perspective, the economic programs of Salafi parties can attest to their political commitment and their democratizing potential by illustrating the extent to which these policies denote a programmatic engagement.
Embodied in the slogan “bread, job, and dignity,” the Arab Uprisings demonstrated how economic issues had been crucial for the (mis-)fortune of the incumbents and illustrate how the revolts could be understood, largely, in economic terms (Achcar Reference Achcar2013). Following the fall of authoritarian regimes, political parties running in the founding elections would thus try to attract voters by promising the enactment of policies aimed at improving the economic situation if the parties were programmatic. From this perspective, it is then possible to assess the extent to which Salafi political parties felt committed to participate genuinely in playing the democratic game. The more elaborate, coherent, and realistic their proposed economic policies, the more it is plausible to think of their political engagement as a sign that they legitimize the game being played, thus contributing indirectly to the process of democratization.
Intimately related to the aforementioned aspect, Salafi parties' economic proposals are also useful as a proxy of party institutionalization. Even though the literature still suffers from a number of shortcomings, party institutionalization—in the same guise as the programmatic party–voters linkage—is regarded as a factor of democratization inasmuch as it involves the constitution of political parties as principal gatekeepers of citizens' demands in governing institutions, thus ensuring the functioning of representative democracy (Morlino Reference Morlino1995; Randall and Svåsand Reference Randall and Svåsand2002; Yardimci-Geyikci Reference Yardimci-Geyikci2015; Zollner Reference Zollner2019). Since, among others, such process entails the identification, the selection, and the articulation of dispersed economic interests (Enyedi Reference Enyedi2005; Budge and MacDonals Reference Budge and MacDonals2006), the study of Salafi parties' economic programs can reveal at what point they are in constituting themselves as stable organizations between society—or better, part of it, since each party is supposed to speak to a distinct constituency—and state institutions, independently from the religious movements they originate from, even at the cost of not capitalizing from the Islamist organizational advantage.
All the Salafi parties considered here are the product of Salafi social networks, whether constituted by a Salafi preacher, like the Virtue Party and the Authenticity Party, or veritable grassroots organizations like the Egyptian Da'wa al Salafiyya that gave birth to the Nour party. Thanks to these links, Salafi parties—like Islamist ones—proved able to reach voters in ways unattainable for secular parties. Similarly to the Brothers, Salafis possess a widespread and articulated network of activities that ranges from the provision of social welfare services in deprived areas to university associations to the business sector and enjoy considerable financial strength (Lynch Reference Lynch2010; Al-Anani and Malik Reference al-Anani and Malik2013; Cammett and Luong Reference Cammett and Jones Luong2014). This means that Salafis are able to reach a diverse socio-economic public. For Salafi parties and the prospects of democratization, this is a double-edged sword. In the short period, this large potential electoral basin can lead to stunning electoral performances and might thus be helpful to integrate an otherwise apolitical and apathetic citizenry in the procedures of representative democracy. Yet, the need to avoid alienating segments of this large constituency might prevent Salafi parties to emancipate completely from their mother organizations and identify themselves with a more defined electorate: that is to institutionalize. Should this inability to emancipate be confirmed, it would testify the organizational, ideological, and, possibly, programmatic primacy of Salafis' grassroots organizations over the parties. Lacroix (Reference Lacroix2012) captured this point in his analysis of Egyptian Salafis. The lack of party institutionalization for its part goes against the exigencies of the democratization process (Morlino Reference Morlino1995; Yardimci-Geyikci Reference Yardimci-Geyikci2015; Zollner Reference Zollner2019).
One of the most significant indicators to examine the level of party institutionalization is to look at whether parties are trying to gain autonomy from their mother organization through the elaboration of economic proposals that speak to identifiable socio-economic constituencies. From this perspective, the study of Salafi parties' economic proposals might reveal whether the process of party institutionalization occurs and at what point it might be—and with it its effect on the process of democratization. Yet, Salafis' economic proposals have not garnered much attention. In part, such analyses are largely missing because other aspects of Salafism have been deemed more important or interesting for both scholars and policy-makers (Meijer Reference Meijer2009; McCants Reference McCants2015; Cavatorta and Merone Reference Cavatorta and Merone2017), notably security and ideology, and in part because of the paucity of Salafi writings on the economy and its workings in the globalized international system within which Arab countries are inserted. As mentioned though, post-revolutionary political openings in a number of countries offered Salafis the opportunity to deal with economic issues more directly and in a pluralistic environment. Nonetheless, it is not clear to what economic paradigm Salafi parties ascribe. Due to their experience in providing welfare services, some observers are more inclined to locate Salafis on the left-side on the political spectrum as far as their economic policies are concerned, while others think of them as belonging to the free-market neo-liberal camp for their defense of the private property and unhampered individual enterprise (Lacroix Reference Lacroix2016; Carbonari Reference Carbonari2011). Even less clear is whether it is possible to speak of a genuine Salafi economic program, or whether Salafis' economic proposals are just a jumble of economic recipes borrowed from the different paradigms (Kienle Reference Kienle2013). According to Tuğal (Reference Tuğal2012; Reference Tuğal2017), the economic program of Islamist parties might indeed absorb some elements of economic neoliberalism, depending on the authoritarian economic policy-making they are dealing with and the structure of the religious field itself, so as to propose a post-liberal economic agenda. Salafi parties might indeed follow the same trajectory of mainstream Islamists in this respect and therefore the broader context within which the elaboration of economic proposals takes place becomes significant.
DATA AND METHOD
To better grasp the Salafi economic vision, the focus here is on party manifestos for the elections in Tunisia and Egypt. The stemming sample includes therefore the party platforms of the Authenticity Party, al-Nour, the Building and Development Party (BD), and the Virtue Party in Egypt and the one of the Tunisian Salafis, namely Jabat al-Islah, although references are also made to other Tunisian Salafi parties active since 2012.
The political parties in this analysis did not have the same electoral fortunes. In Egypt, where Salafi parties obtained considerable electoral support, there were significant differences between them in terms of popularity, even though they all ran under the Islam Alliance electoral bloc. Al-Nour became the second biggest party in the Egyptian parliament, garnering around 7.2 million votes and ultimately winning 107 of the 498 parliamentary seats. Far behind, the Building and Development Party (BD) gained 13 seats and the Authenticity Party (AP) only three. The Virtue Party did not enter Parliament. Following the 2013 military coup, all these parties were banned with the sole exception of al-Nour, which secured 11 seats in the 2015 legislative elections. In Tunisia, political Salafis also participated in elections (Karagiannis Reference Karagiannis2019), but their appeal remained modest, because, overwhelmingly, the Salafi constituency preferred to turn toward a new form of jihadi Salafism to counterbalance the country's rapid march toward liberal-democracy (Merone Reference Merone2015). The best-known expression of political Salafism in Tunisia is the Jabhat al-Islah party, which was legalized in 2012. The party had run independent candidates in the 2011 founding elections and competed in the 2014 legislative elections, but it was never able to win a single parliamentary seat (ISIE 2012 and 2015).
When it comes to their electoral manifestos, the documents vary significantly in structure and length, denoting different paths of political reflection and maturity. Al-Nour's 2012 manifesto is 32 pages long and is particularly concerned with culture and identity, the economy, health care, and education, leaving relatively little room for institutional issues. Considerable attention to identity issues and the role of religion in the new political system characterize the Building and Development Party's 20-page program, in which institutional concerns are prioritized over economic ones. The Authenticity Party for its part presented a one-page document spelling out 10 main goals. Finally, the Virtue Party presented a 19-page program divided into 11 chapters, and of these, two deal with economics and one with the organization of the state. In Tunisia, Jabhat al-Islah presented a three-page manifesto, which is articulated into succinct points divided into the political, economic, social, and cultural spheres that follow a relatively rich description of the nature of the party.
The aforementioned texts have been analyzed following a sampling procedure. This means that, in order to ascertain what Salafis say in the economic sphere, we have only considered the passages of their manifestos devoted to it. The relevant parts of the manifestos have thus been examined with the aim of looking for the presence of predefined categories that would frame Salafis' economic proposals. Aware that these are by no mean exhaustive, nor sufficient if taken out from the context, we borrowed from the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) two guiding categories: controlled economy and free market. These are related to the two main paradigms in the countries considered—the state-controlled economy of the early post-independence period and the neo-liberal order of the three recent decades—and they served as reference categories to Salafis as well. Differently from the CMP, the purpose here was not to assess the relative frequency of quasi-sentences belonging to one or the other category and to place political parties on an ideological space. More modestly, the goal is assessing whether Salafi economic proposals have internal coherence and whether such proposals are viable. These two latter features potentially reveal if the proposals establish programmatic linkages with voters and if a process of party institutionalization is underway.
REDISTRIBUTION, LIBERALIZATION, AND PROTECTIONISM
When analyzing their economic programs, the first finding that emerges is that Salafi parties in Tunisia and Egypt tried to speak the jargon of protesters quite reluctantly. From the analysis of the manifestos, it appears that all Salafi parties were well aware of the salience economic issues have on the demand side of representation (i.e., among voters), but opted not to follow through in terms of visibility in their manifestos. For instance, only six out of the 31 pages of al-Nour's party platform deal with economic issues. Modest coverage of economic issues characterizes also the Virtue Party (four paragraphs out of 20 pages). When it comes to the Building and Development Party, economic issues are not even allocated a separate section and are mentioned only in passing. As far the Authenticity Party and the Tunisian Jabhat al-Islah are concerned, the few points devoted to the economy are also dealt with very briefly in what are already short political programs, suggesting that the two parties relied more on general sloganeering than on detailed policy proposals to attract voters. This suggests already that the degree to which the parties institutionalized was very low.
Going into greater detail, both our guiding categories—controlled or command economy and that of free market—have been found in all the surveyed parties. In addition, we also found a third one: protectionism. Yet, none of these categories is dominant and it is always unclear how some aspects of each category fit with those of the others. For instance, in the space of a single page, Jabhat al-Islah wishes to “guarantee the right of private property, incentivize investments in Tunisian capital, and incentivize youth to start private projects” while being ready “to re-nationalize all institutions that had been previously privatized.” For its part, al-Nour deems the development of small and medium industries and the setting up of conditions enabling citizens' economic freedom a necessity for Egypt, but, at the same time, opposes the sale of public sector activities, which in Egypt have a considerable role, employ a significant number of people, but are also wasteful and in need of paring down. The Virtue Party makes the comprehension of Salafis' economic programming even more difficult by envisaging three forms of property: the private, the public, and the cooperative. Yet, none of these is privileged over the other, with each believed to play a distinct functional role for the development of the Egyptian economy. Public property is depicted as “the main way to achieve comprehensive economic development.” Private property is praised for its “creative role as productive of national capital” in that it is “innate in men.” The cooperative one is portrayed as a residual category seen as the most appropriate when the previous ones fail or prove to be inappropriate. Attempting to associate these parties to well-defined economic policies is therefore rife with difficulties and testifies in a way to the complexity of clearly understanding where Salafis stand because Salafis themselves find it difficult.
The first category that emerges from the analysis of the party manifestos is a controlled economy that correlates strongly with redistributive economics. This appeals to those struggling economically and reflects parties' attempt to side with the lower classes and, as mentioned, to speak the jargon of the revolution. Al-Nour's advocates, for instance, the introduction of a minimum wage to be indexed to the cost of living. This is particularly important for public sector workers (“a higher ceiling should therefore be set for governmental and public sector wages and salaries”). More than that, all the Egyptian Salafi parties favor a balance between minimum and maximum wages for workers of the public sector to avoid distortions among workers and harmonize Egyptians' living conditions. Al-Nour also calls for the expansion of job programs and proposes greater investments in education and social housing.
Crucial to redistributive economics is the emphasis on achieving social justice, which is the central feature of all the party manifestos in our study and is the main goal of parties' economic proposals. In al-Nour's views, for example, social justice and redistribution are key for the betterment of society and for greater economic development because they trigger social solidarity, cooperation, and mutual trust. To attain such goal, Salafis envisage a variety of tools that seem to form a veritable Salafist economic policy in that, despite being borrowed from different political traditions, they are found across different Salafi manifestos. While this might seem in line with traditional leftist thinking about state intervention and wealth redistribution, the reality is quite different because Salafis only see a limited role for the state in this redistributive effort. It is therefore no surprise that fiscal policy is mentioned only in passing and all Salafi parties are silent about the resources needed to cover social spending and welfare measures. Unlike in traditional leftist economic programs, Salafis do not envisage transfers from the wealthier classes to more deprived ones through the state. Nor they do sketch out a tax system that would allow for the covering of the minimum wages for the public sector or the funds necessary for social housing and job programs. The only Salafi party making reference to taxes is the Building and Development Party. Yet, it only mentions fiscal policy in very vague terms, stating simply that “taxation should be fair”—even though it is not clear who it should be fair to.
Rather, there is considerable emphasis on private or semi-private religious institutions taking over welfare and productive investments. Thus, covering the costs implied in the achievement of social justice and social solidarity fall on other measures that, even though institutionalized in the framework of their respective national economies, remain merely charitable. In this sense, Zakat and Awqaf are presented as a solution. The first is one of the five pillars of Islam prescribing that wealthier individuals should “purify” their wealth by paying alms that will be distributed to more disadvantaged social strata. The second, which is a religious institution, is individuals' donation of buildings, plots of land, or other assets for religious or charitable purposes. All Salafi parties envisage the expansion and the reactivation of those religious institutions to guarantee economic redistribution and fight poverty. This is also a clear nod to the role that the mother organizations of these parties should take. The role the State should have in their management is however not clear, with parties like Jabhat al-Islah totally silent on the point and others like the Building and Development Party envisioning the state as the arbiter entrusted with the power of guaranteeing their functioning—even though it is not specified how. For its part, al-Nour envisages some form of non-specified collaboration between these religious institutions and the State. All this suggests that social solidarity is not state-driven, but is the outcome of Islamic religious morality, which would “drive” private entities to work toward the delivery of social goods. Philanthropy replaces state-designed mechanisms to provide welfare and redistribute income.
The second element to emerge from the manifestos is a more clearly liberal economic one, which appeals to a wealthier constituency and suggests that Salafis are far from being at odds with neo-liberal economics. Al-Nour's, for instance, calls for the full liberalization of agriculture, the strengthening of small and medium enterprises, as well as for the introduction of more Islamic financial products. Its program also contains provisions the party would make to curb monopolistic tendencies and favor greater competition, which is a key tenet of economic liberalism. Finally, the program recognizes the need for foreign direct investments, preferably from other Arab or Muslim states. Attracting foreign investment is a shared policy in all manifestos and is in line with one of the main tenets of neo-liberal globalization, which requires greater economic integration into the world economy to maximize advantages. Salafis thus envisage forms of economic integration on a regional scale with both Arab and Islamic countries similar to the European example. In addition, Salafis aim at attracting foreign capital to boost development and create jobs. Nonetheless, these foreign investments must not hinder the economic independence of the country and, crucially, they should “not affect the social, political, moral, and cultural construction of the society,” as the Virtue Party, for instance, explicitly puts it. What emerges from the al-Nour's program more clearly (and to a lesser extent from the other manifestos) is a notably moralistic attitude toward the economy and neo-liberal economics in particular.
What can be inferred from Egyptian Salafis' programs is that the neo-liberal economic reforms implemented under the Mubarak regime failed and created greater poverty because they were implemented through corrupt—read un-Islamic—political clientelistic networks and not because they were simply bad policies that per se prevented a fairer society and greater wealth redistribution. With Salafis in positions of power, the state would be moralized and the liberal policies implemented would be successful because the networks of politicians and bureaucrats implementing them would be constituted of moral - read 'real' - Muslim individuals. In turn, businessmen and private enterprises would also act according to ethical religious precepts, making neo-liberal reforms a success. This is the reason why the economic program of party al-Nour, for instance, emphasizes the issue of corruption, which will be solved through religious education and, only marginally, by relying on available best practices. Other Salafi parties share this view, as they place great hope in the moralization of society as the lever for economic success. Similarly to al-Nour, the party Errahma in Tunisia emphasizes the necessity to go beyond social issues and individual rights to offer voters an economic vision they could embrace. The party's leader—the controversial Said Jaziri—called for the industrialization of Tunisia, which would constitute a partial solution to unemployment. The role of private investors, hopefully from the Gulf, would be crucial in this.
In stark contrast with the liberal component, Salafis' manifestos contain also a strong protectionist element. For instance, when it comes to food production and weapons manufacturing, al-Nour proposes that Egypt should be entirely self-sufficient because, as the party puts it, “a nation that does not produce its own food or military equipment is a nation that cannot be independent in its decisions to achieve the public interest.” The Virtue Party and Jabhat al-Islah are also of the idea that economic development has to prioritize food security, as Jabhat al-Islah puts it, through non-better specified policies of subsidies for the agricultural sector, which contradict the policy of market liberalization of the agricultural market and poses questions on where the funds for such subsidies would come from in the absence of greater tax revenues. How this protectionist element can square with the imperative of market liberalization to liberate the energies of ordinary entrepreneurial Egyptians or Tunisians is left unsaid. Also left unsaid is how regional or global integration along neo-liberal tenets can coexist with strict regulations and controls of entire sectors of the economy, although one could imagine liberalization occurring in stages. In this respect, a further interesting point emerging from the analysis of the manifestos of Egyptian Salafis is their very cautious stance toward the reserved domains of the deep state, namely the military. While repeatedly stressing the importance of fighting corruption, monopolies and unfair concentration of economic resources, not a single word is devoted to tackle the question of the military's role in the economy. On the contrary, al-Nour, for instance, highlights the positive repercussions technological and scientific innovations could have for the development of the military sector. Whether this attitude is driven by concerns over political survival or from a naïve belief about the genuine potential of the military sector in the Egyptian economy is hard to gauge. In any case, avoiding targeting the economic role of the military signaled that Salafis did not question the political role of military institutions. Hence, the party envisages subsidies to the military sector as well. Where the resources for these subsidies are going to be found is, again, left unsaid.
In his analysis of the al-Nour policy proposals contained in their 2012 manifesto, Lacroix (Reference Lacroix2016) notes that al-Nour's “discourse…had almost leftist undertones, especially when the Salafis were trying to cast themselves as the real representatives of the poor, implicitly accusing the Muslim Brotherhood of being the candidates of the conservative bourgeoisie.” In contrast, other observers, such as Carbonari (Reference Carbonari2011), found al-Nour to be a genuine conservative party when it comes to its proposed economic policies. The difficulty in locating al-Nour and the other Salafi parties on the left–right political-economic spectrum has to do with the different and contradictory elements of their economic policy proposals. While all Salafi parties (and all political parties in both countries for that matter) call for economic development, it is not clear whether such development should be State-driven or left to the self-regulation of the free market or a well thought out mix of both. Theoretically, development could be conceived as resulting from the adoption and implementation of policies that derive from both economic philosophies, but when one digs deeper into the policy proposals what emerges are a number of contradictory policies and ideological tenets.
NEITHER PROGRAMMING, NOR TARGETING: SALAFIS' LONG MARCH TO BECOME SUITABLE POLITICAL PARTIES
Our analysis of Salafists' economic proposals was aimed at assessing the meaning of their participation in institutional politics and the effects such engagement might have on the political system. First, Salafi parties' targeting of specific audiences through clear economic proposals would attest to their real commitment to play by the rules of the game, thus fueling the engine of representative democracy. Second, the potential feasibility of their economic proposals could demonstrate their intention to establish a programmatic relationship with potential voters, which would, ultimately, give individuals a rational justification for supporting the nascent democratic project.
The fuzziness that emerges from Salafis' economic policy proposals invites considerable caution when considering their political engagement as a clear rupture with the past in terms of both method and content. As far as the latter is concerned, there are no indications that Salafi economic proposals differ in meaningful ways from previous elaborations, insofar as they remain vague and insufficiently developed to be able to speak clearly and in detail to different socio-economic audiences, suggesting instead the priority of maintaining a strong link with the mother organizations, whose ethos and activities are replicated in the manifestos. Moreover, there are some substantive elements that are in clear contrast with the main tenets of liberal democracy. For instance, the Victorian conception of welfare (wealthy private institutions and individuals deciding who are the deserving poor according to morality tests) might be appealing because it relieves the state from providing welfare and would strengthen the role of the Salafi social networks, but it is clearly problematic because it blurs the notion of citizenship and pluralism, particularly in multi-religious countries like Egypt. Would Copts have to create their own welfare institutions independent of the state because of their impossibility to access welfare benefits that Muslim religious institutions deliver? What about those Muslim Egyptians who might not be keen on mixing welfare benefits and a specific type of religious behavior based on interpretations of religious precepts they might not agree with? Related to this kind of content is also the question of method. First, Salafi parties continue to be organizationally indistinct from their mother organizations because they speak to the same public and in a very similar manner. Second, and crucially, they count on the fact that the reasons pushing potential voters toward them are the same that push individuals to approach da'wa-based movements, negating to an extent the necessity to differentiate them on socio-economic basis or to attract other constituencies.
To understand whether this immobility is due to the shortage of time available to Tunisian and Egyptian Salafis or to the impact of the uprisings or, rather, to a common feature of partisan Salafism, we have also examined how Tagammu, a Salafi party active in Kuwait for well over a decade, dealt with economic issues in its manifestos because this can provide insights on how Salafis in different countries influence each other and how much the national economic situation shapes their economic beliefs and policy prescriptions. Tagammu is active in a country with a petroleum-based economy. Nonetheless, the prescriptions Tagammu proposes for the country's economy display significant similarities with those the Salafi parties in Tunisia and Egypt have offered after the uprisings. To begin with, Tagammu proposes to solve the problem of corruption by calling for the introduction of Islamic elements in economic regulations' legislation, especially in the financial sector, suggesting that there is a strong link between religious precepts, morality, and economic performance. The second element of resemblance is the party's emphasis on the achievement of social justice “on an Islamic basis,” which is substantiated in the need to address the problem of housing and wage disparities The party proposes thus to increase job opportunities, revise lower salaries upwards from current levels, and curb current prices. A third significant point of contact with the Tunisian and Egyptian Salafi parties is the presence of free-market-oriented policies, although they are more pronounced in Tagammu's case. In fact, Tagammu calls for the privatization of public companies, the empowerment of the private sector along with investments directed toward small and medium enterprises to, ultimately, “give the private sector the largest role in economic activity and encouraging the investment opportunities available to it.” Indeed, this might derive from the party's concern to remove some economic sectors from an all-encompassing but unresponsive and inefficient government. At the same time, and again in line with the findings from Tunisia and Egypt, it is still hard to understand how the expansion of the private sector can coexist with the redistributive policies proposed by the party, which require considerable state intervention. Nor, and this is the last element of similarity, what the role of the state in such an economic set-up would be.
With the due differences, namely the fact that we have surveyed Salafi parties operating in the context of political liberalization in contrast to a Kuwaiti party operating in a semi-free environment, the nutshell of the Salafi economic proposal seems to be similar across the parties examined. In this regard, it can be said that the uprisings did not lead to the blossoming of new ideas in the field of economic policy in Salafi circles. Rather, all seem to confirm the hypothesis that for Salafis, politics is the continuation of da'wa through the same means but different rules.
CONCLUSION
Rooted as they are in socio-economic inequalities, the Arab uprisings have forced even Salafis to take stock of their religious and political message to deal with pressing economic matters and at least appear to be interested in economic policy-making. The problem for them, as for all other political actors across the region, is the apparent absence of alternative economic models to the neo-liberal one, which entails privatizations, budgetary restraint, open markets, and job insecurity. These economic recipes are likely to worsen the economic conditions of the majority of Arab countries in the short-run at least and they are the very policies that citizens revolted against. At the same time, economic reforms have become an impellent necessity to revive moribund economies where unemployment is high, productivity low, and fairer redistribution of wealth a mirage. Because of this particular historical turn—wherein emergency measures are needed to fight poverty and social injustice but when no other options are on the horizon except the one that led to this point—the contradictions arising from Salafi economic programs are not unique. In fact, poorly conceived and simplistic economic proposals characterize Islamist parties as well as some modernist or nationalist ones. Despite their traditional lack of attention to economic matters, the survival of Salafi parties appears thus intimately bounded to the feasibility of their economic proposals just like for the other political actors in the region. From this perspective, the déjà-vu of policy contradictions, unrealistic expectations, and moralistic attitude risks, in the long run, to undermine Salafi electoral credibility if electoral openings emerge, consolidate, or return. This might explain why, as Bonnefoy (Reference Bonnefoy, Cavatorta and Merone2017) contends, staying away from engagement in politics to move back into quietism is the growing trend in Salafi circles since the mid-2010s. It is then in this “quietist” field that the daily economic practices of ordinary Salafis unveil in fact the adherence to the neo-liberal and consumerist economy where material success is perceived as God's “choice” for those who lead a moral and religiously rigorous life. In this respect, there seems to be the acceptance that participating in politics in societies that are “unjust” is not permissible. Social change is rather understood as triggered by individuals and the power of (pious) example. The improvement of the economic conditions would just be a natural consequence of such a change in which the market rewards only morally and religiously deserving individuals.
In the electoral contests that took place in Egypt and Tunisia, Salafi parties had the opportunity to present their economic visions in the competitive market of ideas, but, much like all the other parties, failed to put forth a viable program that would take into account the difficult situation their countries faced. Rather, they preferred to adopt some of the jargon of the revolutionaries and offered contradictory and naive policies that pandered to the electorate without breaking with the way in which their mother organizations dealt with socio-economic issues. In this, they were not much different from other Salafi parties operating in more autocratic polities—as the case of the Kuwaiti Tagammu shows. Nor, once again, did they behave any differently from their much-maligned competitors. This all speaks to a very weak inclination toward party institutionalization, which is detrimental to democratization. The larger problem though is that party institutionalization is low not only within Salafi circles, but in the broader party systems of the countries under scrutiny, meaning that the path toward democracy and/or democratic consolidation is still very long. Research on political parties in the Arab world has for a long time been rather narrow because the focus has been exclusively on Islamist parties, with work examining their history (Wegner Reference Wegner2011; Wolf Reference Wolf2017), their potential contribution to democratization (Abukhalil Reference Abukhalil1997), ideology (Schwedler Reference Schwedler2006; Kandil Reference Kandil2016), electoral strategies (Masoud Reference Masoud2014; Pellicer and Wegner Reference Pellicer and Wegner2014), policy proposals (Kienle Reference Kienle2013), or record in power (Guazzone Reference Guazzone2013; Pioppi Reference Pioppi2013). Central to all these discussions about Islamist parties has been the inclusion-moderation hypothesis, particularly in attempting to determine the degree of democratic credibility of Islamists and by extension the democratization potential of Arab countries. When Salafi parties came on the scene after the 2011 uprisings, the same hypothesis was employed to gauge where they were at. Through an examination of Salafi parties and their economic policy proposals, in particular, this study shifted the attention away from the inclusion-moderation toward party institutionalization. The latter proved to be a clearer and better gauge of the democratization potential of Arab countries and it is precisely such institutionalization along with the type of party–voter linkage—of all parties—that should drive how one understands the developments in Arab party systems.
