Egypt: Some Reflections on the Elections

Although slightly over half the elected seats in Egypt's Parliamentary election will be decided next Sunday in a runoff, the results of round one leave us in little suspense about what round two will bring. A few small footholds for the opposition, and possibly a complete shutout of the Muslim Brotherhood, which in 2005 won 88 out of 508 seats. I want to offer some early reflections on the Egyptian vote, which of course tells us little about real Egyptian opinion. As always, this reflects my personal opinion and not that of the Middle East Institute or The Middle East Journal, which do not take positions on issues in the region. It's also the view of someone who hasn't been there for some years, and certainly not for this campaign, so they're reflections from a distance. A few early reactions:

• More than any other recent election, this one has revealed the utter weakness and impotence of the legal opposition parties. Since the resurrection of political parties under Anwar Sadat in the 1970s, they have had to dance to the ruling party's tune, or find themselves undercut or even banned. Though there is a relatively large number of legal parties, they are for the most part ephemeral, often consisting of a few supporters of a given figure, or adherents to a particular ideological niche. Neither the Muslim Brotherhood nor the long-discussed Wasat or center party (a party of younger Islamists) have been permitted to function as legal parties. When the old, long established Labor Party was effectively turned into a vehicle for the Brotherhood, the regime encouraged leadership challenges and in the end it effectively disappeared. More recently the government has encouraged splits in the leadership of both the Wafd Party and Ayman Nour's al-Ghad, which itself split from the Wafd. The Wafd, once a genuinely popular party with grass-roots support, has been transformed into a party that, in this election, often seemed to be playing the government's game.

• The fragmented nature of the opposition parties has kept them as ideological debating societies. The attempts at a broad-based opposition movement — the Kefaya Movement, the April 6 Movement — have withered under government repression, divisions among their leaderships, and their inability to function as legal parties. Why parties such as the Wafd (liberal-right) and the Tagammu‘ (leftist) or the Nasserists or the Greens can't forge a common electoral front is in part due to their focus on their ideological debating points rather than trying to win electoral support.
  

• The Muslim Brotherhood, though not a legal party, has also been played by the ruling party. Its relative success in 2005 — winning those 88 seats — was not really a repudiation of the regime; it's obvious (as shown again this time) that the Brotherhood only wins seats the government wants it to win. They won in 2005 because the government was under pressure from the Bush Administration to liberalize. They were saying, in effect, "look who could win if we held free elections," and, combined with Hamas' victory in the Palestinian elections, they convinced some folks in the US to back off. The Brotherhood chose not to boycott the elections this year, and that gave them a superficial credibility that a Brotherhood boycott would have denied them, but so far it looks like a shutout anyway. They may boycott round two, but that itself is still in doubt. If they do, they'll have no seats at all, but that may be foreordained anyway.

• Mohamed ElBaradei (remember him?) seems a spent force. He's already acknowledged he won't win the Presidency since he can't legally run; but rather than remain a sort of lightning rod for the opposition (which he seemed to be at one time), he neither tried to forge an opposition alliance nor urged a boycott; in fact he spent much of the campaign outside the country. There is still no one figure in Egypt who can provide a rallying point as an alternative to Gamal Mubarak, despite the rather obvious lack of enthusiasm for Gamal, who lacks even his father's rather limited charisma.

• The government isn't even pretending to bother about democratic trappings any more. It amended the rules to eliminate judicial supervision of the elections, which had led to somewhat cleaner elections the past couple of votes; it flat-out banned foreign observers as an infringement on Egyptian sovereignty (and Joe Stork of Human Rights Watch was detained on election day); it restricted, though it didn't ban, Egyptian civil society groups' own monitoring; it simply disqualified opposition candidates and, in some cases, flat out kept people away from the polls. The takeover of al-Dostor (though not by the government: by the head of the Wafd!) and the closing of many satellite TV channels has been noted here several times. It appears that even the figleaf of a pretend democratic system is being set aside as the government moves into a Presidential election season. But virtually no one not named Mubarak will be able to run: a constitutional amendment requires any party fielding a candidate to have existed at least five years and to have at least five percent of the Parliamentary seats. If the second round goes like the first, all the opposition parties put together could have less than five percent. (And the rules for independents are even more restrictive.) The government could, of course, change the rules again, but if the Parliamentary election is any indicator, it's not leaning that way.

In my noting the weakness of the opposition parties, I do not mean to place the blame for that weakness entirely on them. The government has shown it can break any party that shows too much independence, or favor those that play along.

More after round two, if not before.