A few days ago, Al-Umma Party — formerly the Islamic Action Front (IAF) — elected Muath al-Khawaldeh as its new secretary-general, in the party’s first leadership elections since changing its name. The election comes at a fundamentally different moment from previous leadership transitions, following the legal ban on the Muslim Brotherhood, with which the party was historically associated and which for decades constituted its principal political and organizational reference point.

Al-Khawaldeh’s election carries two clear implications. The first is generational. Born in 1985, he belongs to a younger generation than the historical figures who have successively led Jordan’s Islamist movement and its political party. He previously emerged as a youth leader and participated in the 2011 popular protest movement. The second concerns his position on the party’s internal political map. He is generally associated with its more moderate and flexible tendency, in contrast to his rival, MP Ahmad al-Qatawneh, who is identified with the party’s more hardline current. The vote itself revealed how closely balanced these forces are: al-Khawaldeh received 382 votes against al-Qatawneh’s 369, before the latter withdrew from the runoff.

The composition of the new leadership, however, has yet to be fully settled. Under the party’s new bylaws, al-Khawaldeh must still select the members of the Executive Office, who require the approval of the Shura Council. Internal assessments suggest that the more hardline tendency has a strong presence in the council. This presents the new secretary-general with an immediate test: how can he form an Executive Office with which he can work effectively while also accommodating the party’s internal balance of power, particularly regarding key positions such as deputy secretary-general and party secretary? The challenge is especially significant given al-Khawaldeh’s stated desire to bring in new faces while other forces within the party favor continuity.

Yet the more important issue is not the names themselves, but the policies likely to emerge from the composition of the new leadership. If the result is a consensual Executive Office bringing together the different tendencies — arguably the most realistic scenario — al-Khawaldeh may find that his room for introducing substantial changes to the party’s discourse, political behavior, and strategic direction is limited. The Islamist movement’s own history makes this question particularly relevant. Previous attempts at power-sharing between what have traditionally been described as the “hawks” and “doves” have not always been smooth, at times producing internal crises, resignations, and disputes over authority and political decision-making.

Beyond the composition of the leadership lies a deeper challenge concerning the party’s future after the banning of the Muslim Brotherhood. Legally, the Brotherhood is now outside the permitted political sphere, and the government has prohibited its activities and membership. This does not necessarily mean, however, that the old organizational model or the political culture built up over decades has disappeared. Within internal debates, there remain tendencies attached to the Brotherhood’s name and historical symbolism, as well as to the idea that some form of organization could continue alongside the legally registered party. This recalls a model familiar from earlier Arab Islamist experiences: a legal political party operating publicly, while a movement-based organization continues in the background.

Such an arrangement is extremely difficult under current conditions. Jordan’s domestic context, as well as the regional and international environments, has changed considerably, while the state has made clear that organizational activity conducted in the name of the banned Brotherhood falls outside the legal framework. Recent months have witnessed arrests of individuals over activities that the authorities said were connected to the banned organization. One of the new leadership’s principal tasks, therefore, will be to resolve this grey area and draw a clear line between two distinct phases: moving from a party widely perceived as the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm toward a political party that stands on its own, with a distinctly national identity, its own organizational structure, leadership, and independent decision-making, without parallel leadership structures or organizational labels that reproduce the old model internally.

Closely connected to this is another difficult challenge: managing the party’s political discourse and defining the relationship between its organizational leadership and parliamentary bloc. Some MPs have, at various points, adopted positions and rhetoric that appear relatively independent of the party leadership, with noticeable differences in political language and the ceilings of public discourse.

Drawing on Richard Katz and Peter Mair’s distinction among the three faces of party organization — the party on the ground, the party in central office, and the party in public office — Al-Umma’s challenge lies precisely in managing the relationship among these different levels. MPs may regard their electoral legitimacy as giving them considerable autonomy from the organizational leadership. What is therefore needed is a more effective coordination mechanism that does not reduce the parliamentary bloc to an administrative extension of the Executive Office, but ensures that it ultimately reflects the party’s broader political positions and strategic choices.

The larger political challenge concerns the party’s relationship with the state. Al-Umma remains Jordan’s principal opposition party, having achieved an unprecedented result in the 2024 parliamentary elections by winning 31 of the 138 seats. Yet that result cannot be treated as a permanent political asset that will automatically be reproduced in the next election. The political environment has changed since then, relations with state institutions have become more strained, and several developments indicate that both sides have entered a different phase from the one that preceded the 2024 elections.

This places the party before a strategic question that goes beyond managing the immediate crisis: what kind of relationship does it want with the state in the coming period? Does it seek to repair relations, send new political signals, rebuild trust, and define more clearly the permissible space within which it can operate as an opposition party — a course that would require a degree of political pragmatism and reconsideration of certain positions and forms of rhetoric?

Or will it adopt a more uncompromising opposition posture, based on the view that the crisis lies not with the party but with government policies, and that the popular and political cost of maintaining a clear opposition identity is lower than the cost of concessions that could erode its identity and electoral constituency?

There is no simple answer. The Moroccan experience, for example, illustrates the political cost that an Islamist party may incur when it moves from opposition into government and becomes responsible for difficult compromises and policy choices. The Tunisian experience, despite its very different circumstances, illustrates another dimension of the Islamist dilemma, particularly when political pragmatism itself becomes contested within the movement’s organizational and social base. The issue, therefore, cannot simply be reduced to a choice between “moderation” and “hardline politics.” It concerns the political function Al-Umma wants to perform within Jordan’s evolving political system.

The question becomes even more complicated against the backdrop of regional and international transformations: the war in Gaza, the future of the West Bank and Jerusalem, Israeli policies, and the changing international environment surrounding Islamist movements, including the emergence of increasingly restrictive approaches toward them in several Western capitals. These factors mean that the party’s domestic choices are, to a significant extent, being shaped by a regional environment over which it has little control.

Within a relatively short period, Al-Umma has passed through a succession of turning points, each of which, under different circumstances, could have triggered a major internal crisis: the banning of the Muslim Brotherhood, the change of the party’s name, legal cases and trials involving some of its members and MPs, and now a generational transition in its leadership. Al-Khawaldeh’s election, therefore, cannot be understood simply as a routine change in the office of secretary-general. It comes at the heart of a transitional phase whose ultimate outcome remains unsettled.

The real question, then, is not whether the party will change the names and faces in its leadership or Executive Office. It is whether it can genuinely make the transition from the “Islamic Action Front,” with all the historical and organic legacy of its relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, to “Al-Umma” as a Jordanian political party seeking to redefine its identity, political function, relationship with the state, and social constituency.

It is in the space between this new identity and the old legacy that the party’s future will most likely be determined.