Daily Archives: May 25, 2012

Egypt

Sabahi wins Cairo, but not by enough to enter runoff

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The long-awaited votes from Cairo appear to have been counted and the tally is as follows:

  • Hamdeen Sabahi, leftist neo-Nasserist — 993,464 (34.6%)
  • Ahmed Shafiq, former Mubarak official — 744,138 (25.9%)
  • Mohammed Morsi, Muslim Brotherhood candidate — 579,715 (20.1%)
  • Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, alternative moderate Islamist candidate — 553,200 (19.2%)

If true, it means that the heart of Egypt’s revolution turned to Sabahi as its candidate, indicating that they were too uncomfortable with the Islamist roots of Aboul Fotouh, despite his call for moderation, and also with the ‘felool’ background of Amr Moussa, the former secretary-general of the Arab League and decade-long foreign minister for Hosni Mubarak.

Official results have not yet been announced, but as Friday closes in Egypt, it appeared all but certain that Morsi would finish in first place nationally, followed by Shafiq in second, with Sabahi following very closely behind in third place and Aboul Fotouh not incredibly far behind in fourth.

As Egypt now starts to turn toward the Morsi-Shafiq runoff, it is a bit staggering to see that the leading candidate among the voters of Egypt’s largest city will not have a place in the second round.  As such, it will be interesting to see what indications Sabahi himself gives for the second round — it’s difficult imagining Sabahi endorsing Shafiq, but it’s just quite possible to see him uniting with Morsi for a wide anti-regime front in the runoff.  Note that Sabahi could also urge his supporters to abstain from the runoff — if they did so in large measure, it would vastly reduce the legitimacy of whichever candidate wins on June 17.

Sabahi was the only one of the five major candidates to be neither ‘felool’ associated with the Mubarak regime nor an Islamist, and he caught a wave of popular support at the very end of the campaign — you wonder what he might have done if he had a few more days to capitalize on that momentum.

He was, by and far, the most anti-Israel (and anti-US) of the five candidates as well — expect to hear some more deep-throated Israel-bashing from both Morsi and Shariq over the next month as they vie for his supporters, too.

Ultimately, I think Sabahi captured, with what I’ve called a ‘neo-Nasserite’ approach, a sense of all the pride lost in the past 40 years in Egypt — despite Gamal Abdel Nasser’s failure to build a long-lasting Arab union, Nasser’s victory in the Suez crisis showdown and his nationalist approach in newly-independent Egypt emboldened the Arab world and emboldened Egyptians to believe in a brighter future.  In the Nasser era, there was no disputing Egypt was at the heart of the Arab world — militarily, economically, culturally and intellectually.  Today, Egypt is the sick man of the Middle East — under the sclerotic regimes of Anwar Sadat in the 1970s and of Mubarak from the 1980s until last year, Egypt suffered a stalemate in the 1973 October War and has been stuck in a detente with Israel ever since — supported by Egypt’s military, but not by its populace and not exactly by its Arab neighbors.  Egypt has watched as the economic center of the Arab world slipped away from Cairo, first to Beirut, and then to the Emirates and in the oil wealth of the Saudi kingdom: Riyadh and Dubai are now more important financial centers than Cairo.  Intellectually, the Emirates and Qatar are leading the way to build educational institutions in the Middle East, not Egypt.  Furthermore, the days when Egyptian film and music dominated Arab culture — the days of Oum Kalthoum and Abdel Halim Hafez — are long gone.

Whoever wins the runoff is going to have to tap into exactly that sense of wounded pride — but also show a vision for how to recover that pride.

The tragedy of the anticipated runoff is that it includes the two candidates least likely to have the political skills or the ideological breadth to accomplish that.

Egypt

Felool me once, shame on you: Morsi-Shafiq ‘nightmare runoff’ starts to take shape

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As The Guardian pointed out earlier today, Muslim Brotherhood presidential candidate Mohammed Morsi, who appears to have finished first in this week’s Egyptian presidential election, posted a long, rambling video in English earlier this month.

You can see why some people have called him charisma-challenged, even taking into account that English is not his first language (although he did live in California as an academic for the better part of a decade).

But if, indeed, the runoff shapes up as a contest between Morsi and former Mubarak prime minister and Air Force commander Ahmed Shafiq, you’ll see a lot of people lunging toward Morsi as the only possible candidate.

To keep from erasing the gains of Egypt’s revolution, revolutionaries and liberals and secular reformers and pro-democracy forces will all have to swallow their anxiety about the Muslim Brotherhood, about joining hands with Salafists, about Morsi’s statements about making Egypt a more Islamic society.

Although returns from Cairo and Giza are not totally in, and there’s some hope that neo-Nasserist / leftist / nationalist Hamdeen Sabahi could eke out a surprise leap into second place, most news sources in Egypt are reporting that the Morsi-Shafiq runoff is all but settled.

Even today, in the most unlikely commentary I’ve seen so far, Elliott Abrams, a top foreign policy official Bush administration, has written a piece in The Weekly Standard entitled ‘Two Cheers for Morsi’, making the obvious, yet staggering point, that Mubarak well could have engineered a transition to Shafiq without Egypt having gone through the Tahrir Square protests and the ensuing 15-month drama:

There would be a historic irony if Shafik were to end up as president of Egypt. Had Mubarak and the Army played their cards better, Shafik might have been Mubarak’s successor without the uprising that Egypt has experienced. Had Mubarak realized and stated publicly that at 82 he could not run again, and said that Egypt was not a monarchy (or a fake one like Syria) and that his son Gamal would not succeed him, I believe the Egyptian revolt would never have taken place. Mubarak and the Army could have agreed on Shafik as their candidate: He was close to Mubarak and like him an Air Force general, and, as we now see, he is indeed the man the military have agreed should run and represent their interests.

As a spokesman for Shafiq rather chillingly told The New York Times today:

 “The revolution has ended,” he said. “It is one and a half years.”

Not out of affection for Morsi or zeal for Islamists, but rather out of the recognition that a vote for Shafiq is a vote to betray the revolution, the refrain in the coming days from many corners is going to be: We’re all Muslim Brothers now.

Egypt

Early returns indicate a likely Morsi-Shafiq runoff

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UPDATE: 11:25 a.m. Cairo time.  With nearly 20 million votes counted, it looks like Morsi is leading with 26.9% and Shafiq is second with 24.2%. Sabahi is in third place with 19.4%, Aboul Fatouh is close behind with 17.9%, and Moussa lags far in fifth place with 11.2%.

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It’s still not official, Giza and Cairo returns are yet to be counted, and early returns are just that — early — but it’s looking increasingly like the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate Mohammed Morsi has done fairly well, and that his opponent in the June runoff could well be Hosni Mubarak’s former prime minister and Air Force commander and civil aviation minister Ahmed Shafiq after a first round that could see any of five candidates emerge for the June 16-17 runoff.

The Muslim Brotherhood has been increasingly confident as the counting has gotten underway — even in a country like Egypt, which is undergoing its first free and fair presidential election in history, campaigns generally are not this cocky unless they are pretty certain of victory.

If indeed Shafiq is headed for a top-two finish, it would explain why former Arab League secretary-general and former Mubarak foreign minister Amr Moussa picked such an odd fight with Shafiq, calling for Shafiq to drop out of the race in the middle of the two-day voting window.  In essence, Moussa may have been trying an 11th hour to paint Shafiq as the true ‘felool’ candidate of the race — the ‘remnants’ of the Mubarak era, attempting to undermine his voter base at the last minute.

As Ian Black wrote earlier for The Guardian, this is sort of a worst-case scenario for Egypt, a runoff between a ‘felool’ Mubarak deep-state retread versus the most conservative Islamist (and Muslim Brotherhood-approved) candidate in the race:

Mubarak’s last prime minister and former commander of the air force is described pejoratively by opponents as the “fuloul” – regime remnant – candidate. This run-off is the nightmare scenario because many people hate both men. A contest between them would be a highly polarised choice that would take Egyptians back to the bad old days before the revolution. The Brotherhood would mobilise massively behind Morsi, with the army and police supporting Shafiq. Violence would be highly likely to erupt. Abstention rates would soar.

A Morsi-Shafiq runoff would remind me of the Peruvian election in 2011, when leftist Ollanta Humala and Keiko Fujimori (daughter of the former Peruvian dictator) advanced to the second round runoff, while moderates Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Alejandro Toledo and Luis Castañeda split the moderate vote.  Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru’s Nobel laureate, likened it to a choice “between AIDS and cancer.”

If Egypt is indeed headed for a Morsi-Shafiq runoff, I think it indicates that we would have been otherwise seeing a runoff between two even more controversial candidates, had they not been disqualified in May: former Mubarak intelligence chief Omar Suleiman and Mubarak’s vice president in the final days of February 2011, and Salafist preacher Hazem Abu Ismail or perhaps even the Muslim Brotherhood’s first presidential candidate Khairat al-Shater.  Suleiman would have appealed to the same “security first” voters that Shafiq has attracted.  Abu Ismail was, as Morsi is now, the most conservative Islamist in the race — Abu Ismail was, in fact, much more conservative than al-Shater — in the same way, Morsi is a more conservative Islamist than his rival Islamist Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, (forget for a moment that Aboul Fotouh, confusingly, has been endorsed by the more conservative Salafist Al-Nour Party and not by the relatively more moderate Muslim Brotherhood, of which he was a member until just last year).

In any event, a Morsi-Shafiq runoff would indicate that the May 15 disqualifications were the absolute pivotal turning point in the presidential race, for what it’s worth.

It would also indicate that, despite Egyptian frustration with the parliament’s dithering after January elections that saw the Brotherhood win nearly half of the parliament’s seats, the Brotherhood is clearly the most potent and organized political force in Egypt today.  Morsi is neither the most charismatic nor the most accomplished candidate in the race — if he emerges not only in the runoff, but as the top choice in the first round, it will indicate that the Brotherhood has even more impressive organization and political muscle than we thought.

Egypt

Egypt runoff: who is Ahmed Shafiq?

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If vote counts continue on their current course, Ahmed Shafiq, 71, will finish in second place in the first round of the Egyptian presidential election with around 24% of the vote, thereby vaunting him into a runoff with the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate, Mohammed Morsi.

Shafiq, among the top five candidate vying for the Egyptian presidency, is the most ‘felool’ — the ‘remnants’  associated with the former Mubarak regime.  A senior commander in the Egyptian air force dating back to the days of the Sadat era, Shafiq served as commander of Egypt’s Air Force from 1996 to 2002.  Thereupon, he served as the minister of civil aviation from 2002 to 2011.

He was Mubarak’s final prime minister as well, having been appointed at the end of January 2011 in response to the Tahrir Square protests against Mubarak’s rule.

As such, he is seen not only as the premier ‘felool’ candidate, but also the favored candidate of the Egyptian army, and the favored candidate of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces that has governed Egypt during its transition since the fall of former president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011.  He is seen as the stand-in, in many ways, to Omar Suleiman, Mubarak’s longtime intelligence chief and Mubarak’s final vice president.  Either one, in a runoff against an Islamist, must certainly represent the “deep state” of Egyptian public life. Continue reading Egypt runoff: who is Ahmed Shafiq? →

Egypt

Egypt runoff: Who is Mohammed Morsi?

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UPDATE 6/24/12: Follow the latest on the Egyptian runoff results here.

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It appears that Mohammed Morsi, 60, the candidate of the Freedom and Justice Party — the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood — has placed first in the first round of Egypt’s May presidential election with around 27% of the vote. 

So, who is Morsi? What does his success mean for Egypt? And what are his chances in the runoff? Continue reading Egypt runoff: Who is Mohammed Morsi? →

Canada, Quebec

Watershed moment for longtime premier Charest amid Québec student protests

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After 100 days of protests from students against a planed tuition fees, and after passing Bill 78, a specific emergency law designed to curb the excesses of the protest (even though polls show that two-thirds of Québec residents are in favor of the government’s position and not the students), with The Globe and Mail quoting signs that read “Québec is becoming a dictatorship,” and with oddsmakers giving military rule in Québec only 5.5:1 odds, well, it might be a sign that Jean Charest’s longtime government may be coming to a denouement.

It’s stunning to think that the leader of a party that was a precursor to Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party has been the premier of the traditionally more progressive, statist Québec for nearly a decade.

Charest was the leader of the Progressive Conservative party from 1993 to 1998, when it held anywhere from two to 20 seats in the House of Commons, and long before its assimilation into the Canadian Alliance, and Harper’s conservative majority.  (Remember that in Canada, provincial parties are not merely extensions of federal parties, even if they share the same name: in the April Albertan election, for example, many federal Conservatives supported not the Progressive Conservatives, but the Wildrose party.)

Yet, Jean Charest has been running Québec’s government since 2003, and he has headed Québec’s Liberal Party since 1998, all without ever becoming terribly popular — and indeed, Charest has spent most of his time as Québec’s premier fairly unpopular — for the better part of a decade, it’s been Québec’s uncannily undead government.

But in the fight over student tuition fees, as a potentially explosive  corruption inquiry also gets underway this week, Charest may have found his Waterloo. Continue reading Watershed moment for longtime premier Charest amid Québec student protests →