Opposition parties in authoritarian regimes are often criticized for coming to resemble the undemocratic regimes they oppose. In the context of the Middle East, this critique usually highlights parties' lack of clear programs and reliance on prominent personalities and family connections to attract support. Scholars of Middle East politics, drawing on Weberian critiques of patrimonialism, have attributed opposition party weakness and failure in part to these personalist forms of organization (Fahmy 2002, Stacher 2004, Lust 2009). Yet while reliance on familial organization can produce specific organizational pathologies, its effects are not exclusively detrimental. This paper draws on the experience of two Middle Eastern opposition parties, Egypt's Wafd and Morocco's Istiqlal, to argue that familial organization is not only a liability, but also a key source of resilience for opposition parties struggling to survive in hostile authoritarian environments. Through a “parallel demonstration of theory” (Skocpol and Somers 1980) based on archival research, ethnographic observation, and interviews with party members, I argue that familial modes of organization support opposition parties in three major ways. First, patrimonial ties enable forms of political promise-making that do not depend on electoral victory. While these parties will not win executive power and thus cannot credibly commit to implement specific policies, they can rely on family connections to evoke their past accomplishments and promise a certain mode of being, if not doing, to potential supporters. Second, actual and metaphorical family ties work to impede fragmentation, which is widely recognized as a major threat to opposition party survival (Schedler 2002). Finally, familial organization facilitates the recruitment of new generations of party members, who are interpellated into formal politics without losing their youthful sensibilities. As youth turn away from institutional politics across the region (Bayat 2010), patrimonial opposition parties remain able to recruit young members. These young members, in turn, have been responsible for substantively important shifts in party policy, including the Wafd's participation in Egypt's 2011 uprising and Istiqlal's withdrawal from the Moroccan cabinet in 2012. Accounting for party survival and behavior requires that we attend not only to the weaknesses of patrimonial organization, but to its strengths as well.