The Saudi Arabia of 2026 is a genuinely different country from the Saudi Arabia of 2015. Women drive. Cinemas are open. Mixed-gender entertainment venues attract millions of visitors. A young, educated generation is entering a labour market that bears little resemblance to the one their parents navigated. These are real changes, not window dressing, and they are popular with the majority of Saudis who have lived through them.
What has not changed — and what the transformation narrative consistently elides — is the political architecture. Mohammed bin Salman has consolidated authority in ways that are without recent precedent in the kingdom’s history. The arrest of potential rivals at the Ritz-Carlton in 2017, the sidelining of the traditional princely establishment, the dismantling of the clerical checks that once provided a degree of institutional constraint — these are features of the new Saudi Arabia as surely as the cinemas and the concerts.
The risk is not that the reforms will be reversed — they are too popular and too economically embedded for that. The risk is that the absence of institutional checks creates a system in which decision-making is concentrated in a single point of failure, and in which the absence of any mechanism for course correction makes large-scale mistakes harder to identify and much harder to fix.
المملكة العربية السعودية في عام 2026 بلد مختلف حقاً عن المملكة التي عرفناها عام 2015. المرأة تقود السيارة. دور السينما مفتوحة. تستقطب أماكن الترفيه المختلطة ملايين الزوّار. هذه تغييرات حقيقية لا مجرد ديكور، وهي تحظى بشعبية لدى غالبية السعوديين الذين عاشوها.
ما لم يتغير — وما يتجاهله سرد التحول باستمرار — هو البنية السياسية. فقد رسّخ محمد بن سلمان سلطته بطرق لا سابقة لها في التاريخ الحديث للمملكة.