Not yet a democracy

Dec 8th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

Egypt’s general election offered voters more choice than past polls, but was still marred by thuggery and fraud

EGYPT’S state radio declared the general election a “splendid pageant of democracy”, yet the voting, staggered over three rounds and five weeks, was marked by fraud, bribery and thuggery that left at least 11 people dead. Preliminary results on Thursday December 8th showed that, technically speaking, Egypt’s ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) had won a big enough majority to go on rubber-stamping laws, as it has since President Hosni Mubarak took office 24 years ago. But it is the election’s other effects that are far more significant.

The most obvious is the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood. The 77-year-old Islamist organisation has been banned by law since 1954 but has fielded candidates as independents since the 1980s. Though wary of provoking the government, the Brotherhood ran for only 150 of parliament’s 454 seats this time; its candidates polled nearly 40% of all the votes cast, winning 87 seats outright, a sixfold increase. In a dozen seats, yet another round of voting is needed to produce a result.

The Brothers would surely have won more, too, if it weren’t for the crude means used to defend several NDP incumbents, once the strength of the Brothers’ surge became clear after the first round in November. Such crudeness, including the arrest of some 1,500 Brotherhood supporters by the third round, is not new to Egyptian politics. But this time it prompted something that is: broad and vocal outrage.

Not only did independent monitors cry foul; so did many judges charged with supervising the voting. One public prosecutor, Noha al-Zeiny, achieved instant fame for blowing the whistle on her own experience of fraud, in a contest between a Brotherhood candidate and a former adviser to Mr Mubarak. The ballot-counting she observed showed the Brotherhood challenger leading by a wide margin, yet the final tally, conducted behind closed doors, somehow produced a big win for the NDP. Other judges recounted still graver misdemeanours, such as riot police and plainclothes thugs beating off opposition voters, and police summarily closing polling stations. The respected judges’ club, in a stormy public session, called for the minister of interior to resign.

In the past, the Egyptian state wielded such power that none of this would have mattered much. But its official narration no longer drowns other voices. Under a fifth of Egyptians now get their news from state television, while more than half follow the al-Jazeera satellite channel (whose crews were repeatedly harassed during the election). The readership of state-owned newspapers, such as the once-essential daily al-Ahram, is sinking fast in the face of racier offerings of a dozen independent tabloids.

One of these, al-Destour, a weekly, reported a case where residents of one Delta village captured three hired NDP thugs, videotaped their confessions, then traded them for five Muslim Brothers held by the police. Comparing scenes of helmeted police and armoured cars in Egypt’s countryside with Gaza and Fallujah, one columnist invited readers to conclude that Egypt, too, is a country “under occupation”.

On Wednesday, police firing rubber bullets reportedly killed two men, possibly supporters of the banned Islamist group, after clashes outside polling stations in the north. In much of the country, however, voting was fairly peaceful. What troubled some observers as much as the Brotherhood’s surge or the government’s panicked response was the near-extinction at the polls of the secular opposition. Enfeebled by emergency laws that preclude normal political activity, the country’s 15 featherweight legal opposition parties failed to gain a dozen seats between them. Oddly, that has not prevented the government from continuing to hound them. Ayman Nour, a liberal who won 8% of votes cast, making him the closest challenger to Mr Mubarak in September’s presidential elections, not only lost his parliamentary seat to a heavily funded NDP challenger but has been remanded in custody on a flimsy forgery charge.

The grubbiness of Egypt’s politics has annoyed the American administration, which wants a smoother democratic transition in a country that absorbs some $1.8 billion in annual American aid. The United States criticised the conduct of the poll, saying it sent the wrong signal on reform. For Egyptians, it has produced other dilemmas. Many are worried by the seeming polarisation between the Brotherhood, which professes a reformist agenda but has never been tested, and a government that is just beginning to produce some economic progress, but has, largely by its own folly, badly damaged its political legitimacy.

The big question now is whether the government will feel obliged to legalise the Brotherhood as a party, and whether this parliament, against whose members some 500 court challenges have already been lodged, will last long. But the election has achieved one firm result: it has strengthened the country’s feeble political pulse. Perhaps, next time, the three-quarters of Egyptians who did not bother to vote will get out and do so.

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