In the midst of the repeated discussions inside the political corridors about the role of youth, their participation, and the importance of their involvement in party work, a fundamental question often overlooked or skipped emerges:
Are we encouraging youth to join parties with a clear ideology, or are we asking them to join first and then later seek out the ideology?
There is no dispute that the involvement of youth in party work carries major strategic benefits, including the development of future political elites, contributing to public policy-making, and honing leadership skills. However, these benefits lose their meaning if they are not built on a solid ideological basis and clear ideological convictions that precede involvement and do not come afterward.
The call to recruit youth, especially at the secondary and university levels, imposes a doubled responsibility on political parties, beginning with providing straightforward answers to the question of intellectual identity:
Who are we? What do we represent? And on what political, economic, and social vision do we stand?
From here, a real issue emerges in the Jordanian party scene, reflected in two essential questions:
Do the political parties possess a clear political ideology and a defined ideological color?
And are the leaders and members of these parties capable of explaining this ideology, deconstructing it, and defending it as a conviction rather than merely a slogan?
The essence of party work is not encapsulated in electoral programs or general headlines, but is based on an integrated system of principles, values, and visions that reflect an understanding of the state, society, economy, and the relationship between the individual and the group. In the absence of this deep understanding, parties turn into temporary human congregations, not into political organizations with a robust identity.
Youth rightfully raise the question of distinguishing between parties: How can one make a decision about membership? And how can a young person ensure that they will not join a party only to discover later that it does not actually represent them?
The answer to this question must be available in every party, not only in its literature but in the awareness of its members, through a clear and declared ideological discourse, elaborating the ideological direction in detail, not just a general description.
Parties, in their essence, belong to two main ideological directions: right and left, with multiple gradations between them, each with its own political, economic, and social visions. The failure to clarify these visions early on plants the seeds of deferred conflict within the same party.
The danger of this ambiguity increases when sensitive ideological concepts, such as economic liberalism and social liberalism, are mixed without in-depth internal discussion. These issues do not remain theoretical but transform into positions and legislations when parties reach decision-making positions, only to surprise the leadership and cadre with deep ideological disagreements that were never discussed.
The true malfunction does not appear in the founding stages, but when the party experience matures and its ability to form party governments and parliaments, where sharp intellectual disparities between members of the same party are revealed, resulting from the absence of foundational ideological discussions.
Therefore, the repeated calls for merging parties, without considering ideological and ideological compatibility, appear closer to numerical accumulation than to political building. Real merging is not based on the aggregation of bodies, but on a unity of vision and conviction.
Just as social integration does not succeed without cultural and value harmony, "political integration" cannot stand without deep intellectual harmony and a shared doctrine.
Building strong and sustainable parties begins with thought before engagement, with conviction before numbers, and with clarity before expansion.
