For Jordan’s King Abdullah II, preventing the Arab world’s wave of uprisings from washing into his country has been an exercise in careful calibration – easing his absolute grip on power just enough to defuse protests.

Upcoming parliamentary elections, the centrepiece of the king’s reforms, will be a crucial test of his policy in the face of powerful Islamists’ demands for more public say in politics.

The Muslim Brotherhood has announced it will boycott the election, saying reforms enacted by the king that could loosen his loyalists’ domination of the parliament and give the body somewhat greater authority do not go far enough. The palace says it won’t go any further and insists the vote will go ahead even without the country’s largest opposition group participating.

The Brotherhood is threatening more protests demanding greater changes that would open the door for it to reach a long-held ambition of forming a government in this close US ally, one of only two Arab nations that have a peace treaty with Israel. The test for it will be whether it can step up a protest movement that has been low-scale and mild in a country where the king has deep-rooted support among powerful Bedouin tribes.

Earlier this month, hundreds of young, bearded Brotherhood activists marched through downtown Amman demanding the election law be changed.

For the past year and a half, protests have drawn only a few hundred participants in Amman, which is inhabited by a mix of poor Bedouins and others of Palestinian origin who in theory would be more sympathetic to reform calls. The numbers are lower in other cities in northern and southern Jordan, where tribal affiliation is stronger.

Wary that a widespread public desire for greater democracy could eventually flare strongly on the streets, the king and his government insist they are sincere on reform.

Abdullah made scores of changes, including amending a third of the constitution. The changes give parliament a greater say in choosing the prime minister and appointing a Cabinet, a task that used to be sole prerogative of the king. Still, Abdullah will have final say over the choice. The government’s powers to dissolve parliament and issue temporary laws in its absence have also been curbed.

Critics say the moves are insufficient.

A new election law enacted last week brought the dispute between the government and the Brotherhood to a bottleneck. The law gives concessions to the opposition by setting aside 27 of the 150 seats in parliament to be chosen by a nationwide list, as opposed to the rest of the seats reserved for representatives from local districts.

Islamists are likely to dominate the national-list seats and get some of the local seats. Pro-government tribal candidates are likely to take most of the local seats, given their strong support from clans and relatives.

The Brotherhood says that will still produce a docile legislature dominated by the king’s loyalists. It demands the vote be carried out under a 1989 election law which gave greater leeway and which at the time resulted in the group winning almost half the parliament’s seats. So it is boycotting the election as it has the past two ones – and its leftist allies are following suit.

Abdullah appeared in a rare television interview recently urging the Brotherhood to contest the election, calling it “one of the components of Jordanian society that we are proud of”. He even hosted leaders of the militant Palestinian group Hamas, who were expelled from Jordan in 1999.

He acknowledged that there “is no country or society that is immune against the danger of chaos”. But he insisted that there was substantial reform that will take hold as time goes on. He pointed to the need for Jordan’s 23 splintered political parties to coalesce into two or three main groups to better contest elections.

In the past year, Abdullah created an independent commission to supervise parliamentary elections – once done by the government – and a constitutional court to monitor the application of more than two dozen amended laws. He changed the political parties’ law to encourage a multi-party system and a municipalities’ law to allow Jordanians to govern their towns by electing mayors and city councils.

He also revoked restrictions on protests and allowed the formation of a teachers’ union, previously banned out of fears it could influence students. He also put his former intelligence chief on trial for alleged corruption, which he vowed to uproot.