Al-Batayneh: Jordan at a Crossroads – The Question That Can No Longer Be Deferred

Eng. Saleem Al-Batayneh

More than six years ago, Jordan’s Economic and Social Council issued a warning in its landmark report The State of the Nation. It concluded that Jordan was suffering from a compounded, accumulated crisis—multi-layered, deeply interconnected, and inseparable in its economic and social dimensions. These overlapping pressures, the report cautioned, were generating further crises that required serious, responsible action—policies that break with the culture of postponement and open a new political and economic horizon. Failure to act, it warned, would turn delay itself into a heavy burden, deepening our crises and threatening national stability.

The phrase “the state of the nation” is not abstract. It reflects a growing sense of anxiety and frustration, particularly around economic and social realities: poverty and unemployment, delayed marriage, rising taxes and fees, punitive fines and surveillance cameras, and electricity bills that have long exceeded any reasonable threshold.

Add to this the structural challenges of the labor market, the erosion of the middle class, decaying infrastructure, declining quality of public services, shrinking purchasing power, the closure of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses, and an ever-widening gap of trust between citizens and institutions.

Very little has been written about the root causes that brought Jordan to its current condition. Time has passed, but the central question remains unchanged—only more urgent. It is a question that can no longer be postponed or avoided:
Where is Jordan heading? What kind of Jordan do we want? And at which point did we go wrong?

How do we preserve stability and maintain relevance in a world that changes every day?

The crisis is real and deepening by the hour. Maintaining the status quo is no longer an option. Public anger is widespread, and ignoring it would be reckless. What ultimately sustains state institutions is not constitutions and laws alone, but public trust—an authority stronger than texts and prior to legislation.

Reform, in whatever form it takes, cannot be reduced to legislation alone, as if laws were a magic wand capable of curing deep-seated structural diseases. Corruption within the law does not necessarily mean corruption of the legal text itself, but rather the distortion of its original purpose—actions that may appear legal in form, yet are illegitimate in substance, often with devastating economic and social consequences.

Jordan’s economy consumes far more than it produces. The soaring cost of public debt exposes not only structural weakness but also a profound failure to build a productive economic base. Economic contraction has become deep and comprehensive, sparing no sector.

More than half a million Jordanians are unemployed. Addressing this reality would require over four billion dollars in productive investment—capital capable of generating real jobs. This, in turn, demands strong and active national capital and domestic companies capable of driving and managing development.

Poverty remains the chronic disease that even the most ambitious development plans have failed to cure. Any government that celebrates statistical success while its citizens grow poorer—by extracting what little remains in their pockets—is a government that has failed at the core of its mission.

Like many Jordanians, I recognize that the erosion of the middle class—the backbone of stability and social balance—was not merely an economic shift. Over the past two decades, this class has been subjected to one of the fiercest assaults in Jordan’s modern history, forcing it to retreat from political participation in exchange for survival.

Words, images, and rhetoric cannot express everything. Some realities run deeper than language allows. We are paying the price for flawed choices that failed to grasp a simple truth: no step forward is possible without a solid foundation of trust—one of the most essential drivers of sustainable economic development.

Discussion of Jordan’s future will continue to circle the same unresolved question: How far have we fallen—and how did we get here?

What we need now is a non-traditional political and economic mindset—one that reconnects thought with reason, concepts with reality, history with the future. We need a genuine definition of “economic modernization,” one that goes beyond outdated slogans and empty terminology, and instead rationalizes economic action before we face a sudden and catastrophic collapse. This requires a qualitative leap in geopolitical and economic intellectual production.

From where I stand, the equation remains upside down.

Either economic reform becomes a genuine national project—one that restores social justice by managing resources fairly and abandoning reckless adventures in taxation, fees, and penalties under names that would defeat even the devil—

Or reform will remain nothing more than numbers announced at press conferences, while citizens continue to pay the price with their livelihoods and their futures: inflation devouring income, unemployment undermining stability, and despair replacing hope.

Al-Batayeneh was a Jordanian Member of Parliament.