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Political parties with clear goals

Apr 18,2019 - Last updated at Apr 18,2019

His Majesty King Abdullah has been meeting with various parliamentary blocs to persuade them to become more articulate in their policies and programmes, and become real partners in the search for solutions to key challenges facing the country.

On Tuesday, the King reached out to the Lower House’s Islah (Reform) bloc for the same purpose, and engaged the 14-member bloc in a heart-to-heart dialogue to motivate them into becoming more action-oriented with a coherent action plans to help solve the country's myriad challenges on the internal and external fronts.

The ultimate purpose of this series of dialogues with informal parliamentary blocs is to establish at the end of the day political parties with clear goals. The King sought the bloc's support for a genuine and effective national dialogue on the problems facing the country, including the promotion of a public-private partnership to address poverty and unemployment that continue to ravage the national economy until this day.

On this occasion, the chairman of the Islah bloc, Abdullah Akaileh, and members of the bloc pledged their support to the challenges posed by the King, and voiced their unequivocal support of the Hashemite Custodianship of the Islamic and Christian holy places in East Jerusalem, as well as to the two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict that the King has been championing from day one.

The day will surely come when existing parliamentary blocs will become political parties, or at least nuclei of the political parties, to help shape the country's policies on the macro-level.

It is no longer enough to express rhetorical support to the King's policies, be they on the Palestinian crisis or the domestic reform package. Much more is expected of parliamentary blocs, including detailed remedies to the problems facing the country.

This would require in-house deliberations by the various existing parliamentary blocs that could end up in the adoption of platforms that Parliament may endorse in due course. Short of that, existing parliamentary blocs would be no more and no less than talking shops that have no lasting effect on national policies.

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