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Egypt

How Egypt’s el-Sisi out-Nassered (and out-Sabahi’ed) Sabahi

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There’s not a lot of doubt about the outcome of Egypt’s May 26-27 presidential elections.egypt_flag_new

Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, the former army chief and defense minister who orchestrated the coup that toppled Islamist president Mohammed Morsi in July 2013, is the wide frontrunner in what will be the eighth national election — including constitution referenda and presidential and parliamentary elections — since the fall of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011.

While there’s plenty of time to speculate about how el-Sisi will govern Egypt as its ‘civilian’ president, he still faces nominal opposition in the form of his only challenger, Hamdeen Sabahi.

Back in May 2012, Sabahi quite nearly made his way into the presidential runoff, and he actually won the greatest share of the vote in Cairo, the Egyptian capital. Though no one expected him to emerge as a major candidate, he slowly became a leading player in the campaign.

Unlike Morsi, he was a secular candidate, so there would be no risk that Sabahi would have turned Egypt over to the Muslim Brotherhood (الإخوان المسلمون), which largely happened once Morsi eventually won the president and took office.

Unlike Ahmed Shafiq, who unsuccessfully faced off against Morsi in the June 2012 runoff, Sabahi never served in the Mubarak administration, and so couldn’t be counted among the felool — or remnants — of the old regime. Rather, Sabahi was as a liberal activist and Mubarak critic in the 1990s and 2000s. During the Tahrir protests, he was on the front lines, urging Mubarak’s fall. 

But more fundamentally, Sabahi seemed to capture the kind of nationalist spirit most often associated with Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s internationally renowned president in the 1950s. Like Nasser, Sabahi is a nationalist and a leftist and Sabahi campaigned on a ‘neo-Nasserite’ platform that included a fiercely independent Egyptian foreign policy and programs to alleviate poverty and unemployment. Though Egypt remains the world’s largest Arab country, it’s no longer the cultural, financial and political engine of the Arab world that it was during the Nasser era, but Sabahi’s 2012 campaign tapped into the same sense of Egyptian pride in the same way as the 2011 revolution centered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, which culminated with the fall of Mubarak’s 30-year regime.

There’s almost no doubt that in a runoff against either Morsi or Shafiq, Sabahi would have easily won the presidency. Ultimately, Morsi won 24.8%, Shafiq won 23.7%, and Sabahi won just 20.7%, leaving Egyptians with a gruesome choice between a Muslim Brotherhood lackey and a Mubarak-era air force general.

Sabahi, like many liberals, reluctantly endorsed Morsi. Also like many liberals, he initially supported military intervention against the Morsi administration in June 2013, with Morsi and his Brotherhood allies pushing the boundaries of Egyptian democracy and constitutionalism.

Unfortunately for Sabahi, he isn’t the Nasser of the 2014 presidential election.

Sabahi isn’t even the ‘Sabahi’ of the race anymore.

That’s el-Sisi.  Continue reading How Egypt’s el-Sisi out-Nassered (and out-Sabahi’ed) Sabahi →

Egypt

Sabahi, moderates, revolutionaries, secularists — all left behind in Egyptian presidential runoff

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In the aftermath of the first round of Egypt’s presidential election, there seemed to be two possibilities in the face of this weekend’s runoff between the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate, Mohammed Morsi, and former Mubarak prime minister Ahmed Shafiq: 

The first scenario would have seen Morsi announce a very broad-based campaign, downplaying the Islamism of his candidacy and emphasizing the moderation of the Muslim Brotherhood (especially vis-a-vis the Salafist Al-Nour party), drawing in secular figures and promising a pro-revolutionary administration that would focus on economic issues, making sufficient concessions to win support from the runners-up of the contest, such as neo-Nasserite Hamdeen Sabahi, the all-things-to-all-people moderate Islamist Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh and former Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa, as well as other key figures, such as Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The second scenario would be one in which the main liberal, secular and pro-revolution political figures refuse to endorse either Morsi or Shafiq (given that Shafiq is seen as “felool,” the remnants of the Mubarak regime and the standard-bearer for the reactionary elements of Egypt’s so-called “deep state,” including the governing Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, it was never likely that any of Egypt’s moderates would rally around him), thereby de-legitimizing, in part, whomever wins the election on June 16 and 17.

As it turns out, it’s the second scenario that’s come to pass: ElBaradei returned to Cairo this week — he had been in Vienna for the first round — calling for the elections to be cancelled and the constitution to be amended.

Aboul Fotouh has refused to endorse either candidate and released a four-point program for Egypt’s next president — he said that Shafiq is Mubarak’s candidate, his participation is illegal and that Shafiq belongs in prison.  Moussa, even as voting took place in the first round, was already calling on Shafiq to drop out of the race.

Sabahi, for his part, has been even more emphatic in his refusal to endorse, joining protests last week in Tahrir Square and calling on the elections to be suspended.

Morsi finished first in the May election with 25% of the vote to just 24% for Shafiq; although Sabahi won Alexandria, Cairo and much of the urban electorate, he was edged into third place with just 21% support, followed by Aboul Fotouh in fourth place at 17% and Moussa in fifth place at 11%.

The disappointing shift in the presidential race has taken place against the backdrop of near-daily landmark twists and turns for the new Egyptian governing order:

But far from being an opportunity for the Muslim Brotherhood to find common cause, public opinion since the first round has hardened against both Morsi and Shafiq– the runoff is now seen as a choice between two tired paths, neither of which have offered Egyptians much in the past four decades since Nasser: semi-authoritarian “security” versus the unknown Islamism of the Brotherhood, leaving the broad ‘civil state’ Madaniyya— Egypt’s secular moderates, liberal democrats, the underemployed youth, the underemployed urban and other pro-revolutionary Egyptians — without a true voice in the runoff:

Non-Islamist groups accuse the Muslim Brotherhood of dragging its feet over guarantees for a civilian state because it believes [Morsi] will win. In the meantime, the Brotherhood wants them to support [Morsi] under the banner of “saving of the revolution” without offering anything in return. Mistrust of the Brotherhood has grown since the revolt against Mubarak ended and, together with the Salafist Nour Party, it won nearly 70 per cent of parliamentary seats. Non-Islamist parties say the Brotherhood refused to support them during a series of bloody clashes against the military when they were demanding a clear timetable for the return to civil rule. They also claim the political Islamic group is seeking to monopolise the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary, effectively replicating the one-party system of rule under Mubarak’s National Democratic Party….

“The Brotherhood are here to convince us to vote for [Morsi],” said Tahani Lashin, an activist with the Popular Socialist Alliance Party. “But they refuse to give any concrete commitments, asking us to trust their promises and good intentions. We tried that many times before and they have never kept their word.”

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

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%.

* * * * *

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

Abdoul Fatouh v. Moussa v. Morsi v. Sabahi v. Shafiq: five vie for two runoff slots in unpredictable Egyptian race

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Egyptians go to the polls today and tomorrow to cast votes in a presidential election unprecedented in not only Egypt, but the Middle East.

Since the disqualification of three of the top candidates just one month ago, the bumpy race has settled into a vibe that has electrified the 82 million citizens of the world’s largest Arab nation, the latest and, perhaps, greatest act in a drama that began with the protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that led to the downfall of longtime strongman Hosni Mubarak in February 2011. 

Polls have shown any number of candidates in the lead, and two weeks ago, two of the presumed frontrunners, Amr Moussa (above, right) and Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh (above, left), sparred in Egypt’s first-ever presidential debate.  But they are not the only candidates with a chance to win the presidency.

The truth is that, for all the interest — both in Egypt and abroad — no one knows who will emerge as Egypt’s next president (which is in itself a fascinating statement on the success Egypt’s democratic transition).  The only safe prediction is that this week’s vote will result in no candidate winning over 50% of the vote, necessitating a runoff among the top two winners on June 16 and 17.

Any of the top five candidates could advance to the runoff — including also Mohammed Morsi, Hamdeen Sabahi and Ahmed Shafiq: Continue reading Abdoul Fatouh v. Moussa v. Morsi v. Sabahi v. Shafiq: five vie for two runoff slots in unpredictable Egyptian race →