Authoritarian Nostalgia Among Iraqi Youth: Roots And Repercussions

Marsin Alshamary writes for War on the Rocks:

When I conducted fieldwork in Iraq in January, one of my research assistants was a 20-year old native of the city of Kerbala. He routinely accompanied me to meetings with prominent members of Hizb Al-Da’wa, Iraq’s current ruling party and a key force in the anti-Ba’athist opposition movement during Saddam Hussein’s rule. After spending nearly two hours listening to one party member discuss the repression he faced during Saddam’s Ba’athist era, my research assistant confided in me that he was feeling “lost.” He was unsure, he explained, whether Saddam was really as bad as the interviewees had described. In his view, Iraq’s current leaders only paid lip service to democracy and were so embroiled in corruption that they were, in fact, much worse than the notorious Ba’athist dictator.

Many Arab Iraqi youth, who constitute Iraq’s largest age group, share his sentiments. They are expressing feelings of nostalgia for a time that they did not live through but that they feel symbolized Iraqi national unity and strength. Strongman nostalgia is not unique to Iraq and has been observed in both transitioning and consolidated democracies. Frequently, this romanticization of the past is fueled by a disenchantment with the present. In Iraq’s case, it can be attributed to the inefficient leadership that my research assistant and many other Iraqi youth described, as well as to the ISIL invasion and the Kurdish referendum, both of which raised concerns about the strength of the central government in Baghdad. The apparent longing for the Ba’athist era is further compounded by the slow pace of Iraqi democratization, which can seem prohibitively costly to those who don’t remember the authoritarian past.

Scholars and policymakers should be concerned with how Iraq’s leadership vacuum and the accompanying authoritarian nostalgia will manifest itself in the future, particularly as Iraq’s youth reach the age of voting and political activism. How will these young Iraqis vote, and how will their presence and electoral strength motivate broader changes in party ideology? And if they choose not to vote, as they recently did, how susceptible is Iraq to capture by a strongman? The Iraqi political elite’s decision to ignore both the existence and the causes of authoritarian nostalgia could have serious political repercussions, ranging from anti-government protests to democratic backslide.