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A Palace Conflicted: Royal Family Or One-Man Rule?

towards a new Saudi state?

With the passage of time, however, the standoff which had allowed for decades of royal stability, at the expense of an aging and out of touch leadership, became untenable. Princes such as Nayif or Sultan had been in control of their respective ministries for so long that they effectively had no successor when they died. Whoever took their place would, of necessity, be immensely powerful princes themselves, and therefore already have their own patronage networks and base of support. Structurally, the system as it had developed did not allow for the perpetuation of the status quo. The gap between the sons of the founder (the kings and most prominent princes) and the next generation (including well-known figures in their own right, such as Khalid bin Sultan or Muhammad bin Nayif) was too great, in respect of seniority, wealth and the networks they controlled, for anyone to counterbalance the immense power the original holders of those ministerial portfolios had acquired. Given the traditional deference owed to a senior family member in Saudi society, too, a younger prince, no matter how formally qualified, was no match for a elder uncle in a nominally similar role. As the sons of Ibn Saud began to die off in the aughts, the surviving members started to consolidate their hold in a way that had not been possible before.

After ascending the throne in 2015, Salman quickly shook up the sclerotic state of affairs by concentrating more and more power in the hands of his son Muhammad. Two factors differentiated this new devolution from failed attempts at passing down control to the next generation in the past - MbS was the king's son, and he before long controlled everything. MbS answered to no one, and by virtue of being the royal gatekeeper, everything went through him. The result was a seismic shift that had never been possible, and would never have been possible without having been set in motion by Salman. MbS likes to refer to himself as a disrupter, in the style of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, but it is the king who has ripped apart the present day political structure of the royal family.

In fact, the current trajectory was unsustainable. Salman is in poor health (and by some accounts, barely functioning), and if the existing succession arrangement were to be followed, a gerontocracy is the only result. The throne had to pass to the next generation at some point, the difficulty was not just in finding a consensus and choosing who that would be - the family would never have fallen in line behind that choice. Rivalries would have been between different family lines, not simply between half brothers who, despite their personal ambitions, had grown up together and understood their common enterprise. Cousins who barely knew each other would have been manifestly hostile to competing power centres, the sense of common purpose submerged to different visions of progress or religiosity. Those tensions had been easy to manage with an overriding senior body which commanded respect and deference; a fractured family structure with disparate gravitational centres would have no frame of reference to provide orientation. Whether by design or happenstance, Salman has achieved a radical reorganization.

By sweeping up the totality of state functions, MbS has ensured that no challenge can arise. An orderly transition to the younger generation of princes was never possible, and runs counter to the embedded dynamic. By sidelining all potential rivals and effectively laying the groundwork for an absolutist monarchy, he and Salman have realigned royal family domestic politics. The current upheaval may be no less significant than the shocks to the system the family has endured in the past, but rule by royal 'consensus' was in any event an artificial construct imposed by an unprecedented (and unrepeatable) power sharing arrangement. The family is at a crossroads; the reaction following Salman's death will be critical.

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