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Egypt

Voting will continue until the morale (and turnout) improves

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UPDATE: As it turns out, turnout amounted to just 7.5% in the first two days of voting on Monday and Tuesday. No wonder authorities wanted to keep polls open today — at this rate, they might want to consider opening voting through the whole week. But the high apathy indicates just how uncompetitive this election is — and quite possibly how apathetic Egyptians are about el-Sisi’s soft authoritarianism and his promises to bring austerity economics in a bid to jumpstart Egypt’s private sector.

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Now here’s a measure for increasing voter turnout that I’ll bet the European Union’s leaders never considered:egypt_flag_new

Amid disappointing turnout during the first and second days of the presidential elections, a judicial source has said the High Elections Committee decided to extend the presidential elections for a third day until Wednesday, with voting to last until 9pm on Tuesday.

The High Elections Committee said the elections were extended for another day due to the heat wave, the increasing demand in the evening and the difficulty to extend the voting hours until late at night.

If you don’t like the turnout, just keep the polls open until you do.

Furthermore, Egypt’s military-led government is harassing Egyptians to vote and threatening non-voters with fines of around $72. Interim president Adly Mansour encouraged Egyptians to ‘impress the world’ with a large turnout, and his government proclaimed Tuesday a public holiday, closing banks and other official offices.

If you’re surprised at what seems like a ridiculous aberration for a fair election, don’t be — the ‘election’ is more of a coronation than a truly competitive contest.

The wide frontrunner in the race is Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (pictured above), until late March the army chief of staff and defense minister of the country. It was his decision in July 2013 to overthrow Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first directly elected president in a free and fair election. Though Morsi’s government had tried to pull the country in a more Islamist direction, and though mainstream and secular Egyptians gathered in the millions throughout June and early July 2013 protesting its excesses, el-Sisi’s military regime spent the rest of the year cracking down on the Muslim Brotherhood (الإخوان المسلمون), which it designated a ‘terrorist group,’ and just about anyone else who criticized military rule too loudly, including journalists.

In the months leading to el-Sisi’s resignation from the military, he waged an all-but-in-name shadow campaign for the Egyptian presidency, with the apparent backing of the Egyptian military elite.

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RELATED: The official unofficial el-Sisi
presidential candidacy continues in Egypt

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El-Sisi faces secular leftist Hamdeen Sabahi, who narrowly finished in third place in the first round of the May 2012 presidential election. El-Sisi, who has become genuinely popular in his quest to crack down on the Muslim Brotherhood and in his efforts to stabilize Egypt, is expected to win by a wide margin. Many of Egypt’s top political movements, including the Tamarod (تـمـرد‎) protest movement that opposed Morsi, former Arab League secretary-general Amr Moussa and his supporters, many of Egypt’s most established secular liberal parties, and even many Salafists, who are technically even more conservative than the Muslim Brotherhood, are backing el-Sisi’s candidacy.

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RELATED: How Egypt’s El-Sisi out-Nassered (and out-Sabahi’ed) Sabahi

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When the military government held a referendum in January (Egypt’s third since the fall of former president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011) on amending the constitution, Egyptian voters approved it by a margin of 98.13% to 1.87%. In that election, the turnout was just 38.6% — still higher than the turnout of 32.9% for the equally forced constitutional referendum Morsi held in December 2012 to introduce a new constitution.  Continue reading Voting will continue until the morale (and turnout) improves →

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

The official unofficial El Sisi presidential candidacy continues in Egypt

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It’s nearly April, which means that under the framework discussed at the time of Egypt’s constitutional referendum in January, we should be approaching the final stretch of a new presidential election, the second election in three years in Egypt’s troubled post-Mubarak era.egypt_flag_new

Instead, there’s still no date settled for the presidential election — or for the parliamentary elections that were supposed to be held by the end of July. Rather, Egypt’s interim president Adly Mansour now promises only that the presidential election will be completed sometime before mid-July.

In the meanwhile, Egypt’s defense minister and army chief Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi still hasn’t officially declared whether he will be a candidate in the upcoming presidential election, although the Egyptian military vigorously denied a Kuwaiti media report in early February that El-Sisi was certain to run. But El-Sisi’s candidacy — and his ultimate triumph — seem an increasingly foregone conclusion.

El-Sisi’s face is everywhere, he’s featured on every conceivable kind of merchandise on the streets of Cairo, and despite the military’s suppression of opposition voices within Egypt these days, there’s a genuine groundswell of support for El-Sisi on the basis that he’s the only figure in Egypt strong enough to get the country back on the right track. Continue reading The official unofficial El Sisi presidential candidacy continues in Egypt →

Egypt

Mubarakization watch: Egypt referendum results

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For the record, the results of last week’s constitutional referendum are in — voters approved Egypt’s new constitution by a margin of 98.13% to 1.87%, though on a turnout of just 38.6%. egypt_flag_new

With the opponents of the new constitution boycotting the vote, including the supporters of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, the lopsided margin makes some sense.  The turnout was higher than the 32.9% recorded for the December 2012 constitutional referendum hastily organized to approve the Islamist-friendly constitution promulgated by former president Mohammed Morsi, and it’s only a little lower than the 41.9% turnout in the March 2011 constitutional referendum when optimism ran highest after the collapse of the regime of former president Hosni Mubarak.

But it’s not a great sign for Egyptian democracy that such wide majorities endorsed two very contradictory visions for Egypt’s constitution within the same 13-month period.  It’s also not a great sign that the ‘July 3’ regime, the military government that ousted Morsi last summer and headed by interim president Adly Mansour and defense minister and armed forces chief Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, dispersed and harassed opponents of the new constitution in the days leading up to the vote.  By most accounts, the current government hasn’t been as heavy-handed as the Mubarak regime in the 2005 and 2010 votes, which amounted to show elections, but that’s setting the standard for Mansour and El-Sisi fairly low.

Amnesty International on Wednesday harshly condemned the military regime’s use of force and the infringement of human rights since taking power seven months ago.  The interim government has repeatedly used lethal force to break up protests, largely in support of the Morsi regime.  In a world where the government continues to refuse to allow the Muslim Brotherhood to compete freely and fairly, though, a cloud of doubt will hang over not only the constitutional referendum, but the next two sets of elections.

It’s worth noting that the new constitution marks an improvement in some areas over the 2012 constitution that Morsi pushed through (after initially trying to take dictatorial powers in November 2012) — it theoretically holds Egypt to the standard of international treaties on human rights, takes a zero-tolerance approach to torture, reduces the role of Islam in governance, and improves women’s rights and the rights of religious minorities.

So what comes next?   Continue reading Mubarakization watch: Egypt referendum results →

14 in 14, Egypt

14 in 2014: Egypt referendum, parliamentary and presidential elections

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2. Egypt parliamentary and presidential elections, spring and summer 2014.egypt_flag_new

Egypt will attempt to hit the reset button once again in 2014, beginning with a constitutional referendum on January 14 and 15.  If the referendum passes, the new constitutional reforms provide that acting president Adly Mansour must hold either a presidential or parliamentary elections within three months, with the other election to follow within another three months.

But after the July 2013 coup that ousted Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first elected president, there’s no assurance that the elections will be a fair reflection of the will of the Egyptian electorate.  After a brutal crackdown on pro-Morsi protestors reminiscent of the worst abuses of the authoritarian regime of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, the military interim government branded the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, Morsi (pictured above) remains jailed pending charges for murder and other crimes, and other top Muslim Brotherhood officials are also imprisoned.

There’s no real assurance that the pro-Morsi Freedom and Justice Party (حزب الحرية والعدالة‎), the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, will even be permitted to participate in the elections.  It could also mean that Islamist voters of all shades turn to the more conservative, Salafist Al-Nour Party (حزب النور‎, Arabic for ‘Party of the Light’) or to other more radical Islamist groups that have, since July 2013, worked in tandem with the current military regime.  Other secular groups, like the National Salvation Front (جبهة الإنقاذ الوطني‎) of Mohamed ElBaradei, the former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who briefly served as the interim vice president of the military government, could win seats, but secular liberals failed in the two previous parliamentary elections in 2011 and 2012 to make a breakthrough.  The Tamarod (تـمـرد‎ ) movement, which powered significant protests against Morsi in June 2013 and which supports the current regime, could also emerge as a more permanent player.

But the most likely result could be the coronation of Egypt’s powerful army chief Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi as the country’s new president, who ironically came to power when Morsi himself appointed him to the role in August 2012.  Hamdeen Sabahi, a nationalist liberal who placed third in the May 2012 presidential election, is expected to wage a strong campaign as well.  Since the February 2011 Arab Spring revolts that brought down Mubarak’s regime, political tumult has complicated the economic outlook for Egypt, where a youthful population continues to grapple with too few employment opportunities.

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