  We investigate the stability of highly charged Reissner-Nordstr\"om black
holes to charged scalar perturbations. We show that the near-horizon region
exhibits a transient instability which becomes the Aretakis instability in the
extremal limit. The rates we obtain match the enhanced rates for
nonaxisymmetric perturbations of the near-extremal and extremal Kerr solutions.
The agreement is shown to arise from a shared near-horizon symmetry of the two
scenarios.
