The past week has seen widespread anti-government demonstrations in Iran, and the regime of the ayatollahs has responded with violent repression—including deadly force. Meanwhile there have been no demonstrations in Saudi Arabia, which is just as far from democracy. Why not?
The reasons—and the differences between the two cases—are significant. First, it is no accident that Iran’s regime is led by a man, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is now 78, who replaced a man (Ayatollah Khomeini) who was 86 when he died. That used to be the Saudi model as well, as one brother replaced another on the throne and each was older than the previous. But power is now moving to a new generation in Saudi Arabia. The new crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, is 32, and many of his own key advisers are from his generation. It’s obvious to Saudis that he wants significant social and economic progress and has begun to promote it. To Saudis, this means that their government is in new hands and is suddenly an engine of change—not its enemy, as in Iran.
Moreover, though Saudi kings claim a special role as “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques,” the Saudi regime is civil not religious in nature. A bargain between the clergy and the al-Saud family has lasted for generations, but they remain separate. When, for example, the religious police became widely unpopular, the royal family reined them in and removed most of their powers. While the clergy remain extremely conservative and presumably oppose the recent decisions to allow women to drive, open soccer stadiums to mixed crowds, and permit the opening of movie theaters, power does not lie in their hands. The government made these decisions and can enforce them.
This does not mean that Saudi Arabia is more advanced socially than Iran, which is not the case. But it does mean that Saudis appear to believe their government is pushing the nation forward and defying the clergy—while across the Gulf, Iranians know all power is ultimately in the hands of the clergy, who do and will resist change. The system of velayat-e faqih or “rule of the jurisprudent” that Ayatollah Khomeini established in Iran after 1979 is a theocracy. Power lies in the hands of the clerics, not the government, and the ayatollah who is supreme leader always holds far more power than elected politicians (more on those “elections” in a moment). The supreme leader—and not Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, who is more of a chief administrative officer—leads the Revolutionary Guards and the military as well as the clergy and has the final word on every major decision.
Nevertheless, it is true that political rights are severely restricted in both Iran and Saudi Arabia. All those reforms in Saudi Arabia are exclusively social and economic, and there is no sign of the slightest political opening. Indeed the restrictions are in many ways greater in Saudi Arabia: There are no elections and no parliamentary forms at all, while in Iran the president and a parliament are elected. So again, why are the demonstrations in Iran rather than in Saudi Arabia?
Part of the answer is found in the expectations game: While Mohammed bin Salman (known as MbS) surprised Saudis by pushing unexpectedly for social and economic modernization, Rouhani promised both political and economic improvement and has not delivered on either. Popular patience with Rouhani has clearly run out. As Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations put it, Rouhani “has become a victim of the rising expectations that he cynically stimulated.” Despite the continued and ubiquitous references in the Western press to Rouhani as a “moderate,” Iranians can see with their own eyes that he is not; he is a regime stalwart who will never bring real change (and lacks the power to do so even if he wanted to).
By contrast, it seems to many Saudis that the crown prince has figured out that change is the only thing that will save the House of Saud. The old model of elderly brothers ruling in succession, of an unproductive economy saved by revenues from $120 per barrel oil, of the clerics preventing anything new that smacked of the 21st (or even the 20th) century, was becoming a formula for disaster. Time will run out some day for MbS if he cannot deliver on his promises. But young Saudis will give him the chance to try.
Beyond the issue of expectations there lies the critical question of legitimacy. The great sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset wrote in 1959, “Legitimacy involves the capacity of a political system to engender and maintain the belief that existing political institutions are the most appropriate or proper ones for the society.”
This is precisely what led to the “Arab Spring” revolts, which were uprisings against fake republics in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Syria, where that belief had been eroded and finally destroyed by corruption, repression, and poor governance. There were no revolts in the Arab monarchies (except Bahrain, where uniquely the royal family is Sunni and the population is majority Shia) in good part because those monarchies had not lost their legitimacy.
In our Western view democratic legitimacy is the best and strongest form, but monarchic legitimacy exists in several Arab nations, especially in the Gulf. Some royal families have been in place for centuries; some claim descent from the prophet. It is hard to measure the depth and power of this monarchic legitimacy and no doubt it varies from country to country and royal family to royal family, but it would be folly to deny its power. Performance legitimacy, the credit a government can earn by appearing to its own people as more effective and efficient than any likely replacement, can also be a strong pillar of public support or at least broad tolerance. This is the kind of legitimacy that Lee Kuan Yew, no democrat, gained as prime minister of Singapore.
The Arab fake republics had none of this, and it was quite obvious to citizens of those countries that they were ruled by brute force, that their rulers were thieves, and that things would never get better. Reform was impossible because it would threaten the power of the rulers. Those fake republics all had regular but stolen elections, powerless parliaments, and judicial systems that were absolutely without independence—in other words, all the trappings of Western democracy without any of its substance. The illegitimacy of those Arab “republics” was the Achilles heel of their rulers and their regimes.
And that is precisely the situation in Iran today. It is a fake republic kept in place only by brutal repression. The lessons of the last few decades suggest that stolen elections—such as in Iran in 2009—are more likely to produce unrest than the absence of elections. The phoniness and hypocrisy of fake elections and of Western-style institutions that are actually empty insult and inflame many citizens, especially when combined with massive corruption, repression, and denial of political rights. Whatever legitimacy the Islamic Republic ever had has in the eyes of millions of Iranians been lost.
The Saudis are working hard now to retain their own through reform. But the Saudi gamble is analogous to that of Xi Jinping: Produce enough economic progress and people will forgo political rights. Xi has tightened his own control and that of the Communist party; MbS has centralized power in his own hands. And in both cases, the ideology of the ruling group does not rest on Western ideas about democracy, human rights, and self-government. It rests on Marxism-Leninism in the Chinese case and royal legitimacy in the Saudi—but both are fundamentally fragile if they cannot be reinforced by the tangible gains that performance legitimacy requires.
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Can it work? For how long? In 2009 the China scholar Andrew Nathan described the challenge for Beijing:
This remains accurate as to China, and the determination of the regime to resist free elections of any type and any freedom of speech or press, and brutally to crush those individuals bravely struggling to assert human rights, shows that Xi recognizes the dangers any political opening would bring. The same can be said of Iran. The regime has an ideology, velayat‑e faqih, but it has never been put to a popular referendum and is never intended to be, because the majority of Iranians would never accept it. The regime is not legitimate in the eyes of the people, who know exactly what they want: a Western-style democracy. This is what powered their desire to overthrow the shah in 1979 and powers the protests today, and the regime will always live under what Nathan called “the shadow of the future.” Today’s protests may be crushed just as were those of 2009 by clerics who will kill to stay in power. But protests will return again and again as they have since 1979. Iranians want freedom.
The Saudi case is more complex because there has never been a revolution and the system appears to retain its legitimacy. If MbS can produce economic and social change, demands for political freedom will be muted. Performance legitimacy combined with (and indeed, strengthening) monarchic legitimacy may allow the Saud family decades more of absolute power. But Saudi rulers will need some form of partnership with the ruled. That partnership may be found for now in combined efforts to modernize the economy and the society. In several monarchies of the region, such as Morocco, Jordan, and Kuwait, royal rule is combined with parliaments and largely free elections; these are not absolute monarchies. Perhaps someday the Saudis will have to move in that direction. As far as one can make out today, such political demands as there are in Saudi Arabia relate more to human rights—freedom of expression, rule of law, religious freedom for non-Sunni worshipers such as Shia Muslims and Christians—than to full democracy. Ultimately, however, in a modern society with a growing number of educated citizens, the demand for a real role in governing the country is inevitable.
For now, Iranians are disgusted with the refusal of their rulers to allow change and reform despite their repeated promises, while Saudis are surprised and apparently pleased by their rulers’ insistence on change. Saudis will give MbS time, but their heightened expectations mean that if he fails and the kingdom starts returning to the past, there will be trouble in the streets.
There is trouble in the streets of Iran today because Iranians know exactly what they want, which is freedom, and they have known since 1979 that their rulers will not give it to them. That’s why there has been wave after wave of protests and why they will never end until Iran is free.
Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
