Upping the Ante in Egypt's Parliamentary Elections

By Jennifer Peterson

ALTHOUGH critics across the board have skewered Egypt's top-down reform efforts as deeply flawed and inherently self-serving, it is clear that measures taken in recent months nonetheless have greatly raised the stakes of political activity. Imbued with new significance, the Egyptian political arena has been swept by a heightened flurry of campaigning, mudslinging and undermining, with competition at times becoming literally cutthroat.

After the method of selecting the republic's president was changed in mid-2005 from a popular yea/nay referendum to a multi-candidate poll, no one doubted that President Hosni Mubarak, having already served for 24 years, would be re-elected. While Mubarak predictably succeeded, with 88 percent of the votes cast in September 2005, the new voting system also required the creation of an updated image and rhetoric to shore up claims of there being competition. Once the door was opened, if even a crack, to the mere possibility of defeat, the regime controlled by Mubarak's National Democratic Party (NDP) had to increase mobilization on all fronts in order to justify its foregone victory. Simultaneous to the NDP's hyped-up new look has been the regime's unprecedented leniency toward media criticism.

On the ground, the raised stakes of Egyptian politics have been most apparent through the hiked-up cost of votes-for-purchase and the escalation of poll day violence-tactics intensively employed whenever it became clear that smooth talking alone would not secure "legitimacy." This frantic trend first splashed across headlines during the May 25 referendum on the constitutional amendment allowing for the new presidential polling system. According to the Nasserist Al-Araby newspaper, "yes" votes were being bought for up to 40 LE and a Viagra pill, while the physical assault of opposition demonstrators by police-backed NDP supporters resulted in the referendum date subsequently being dubbed "Black Wednesday."

Then in the parliamentary elections held in November and December, the price of votes sky-rocketed-in one district of Alexandria Al-Masry Al-Yawm newspaper reported votes going for 200 LE and a full meal from Kentucky Fried Chicken. As for physical intimidation, these elections have been described as the most violent ever seen in Egypt, claiming a total of 13 lives across the nation.

Al-Masry Al-Yawm followed the escalation of election violations with a series of screaming red headlines accompanied by scandalous photos. "Who will pay more?" was framed by shots of a man waving wads of cash and women crowding to receive their voting fee, while "Who will beat more?" showed voters hurling stones, and "Who will bleed more?" featured gory close-ups of machete-wielding thugs and victims washing their wounds in blood-filled sinks. On the final day of elections the independent paper ran the massive headline "Ceasefire," underlined by a photo of women opposite a line of riot police.

What made Egypt's 2005 parliamentary elections so fiercely critical-and thus caused them to deteriorate so deeply into havoc-is that their results determine who will qualify as potential runners in the 2011 presidential poll, the first expected to inaugurate a post-Hosni Mubarak head of state. While allowing for elections, the 2005constitutional amendment also set stringent rules for candidacy: a party must hold 5 percent of parliamentary seats in order to nominate candidates, while independent would-be candidates must obtain a seemingly impossible number of endorsements-impossible as long as the NDP holds on to its overwhelming parliamentary majority, that is.

Although not previously experienced at last year's levels, bribery and thuggery are not new to the Egyptian election scene. The real surprise of the 2005 parliamentary poll was the major losses of the NDP and the gains of the banned but tolerated Muslim Brotherhood (MB), which for the first time campaigned openly under its organizational name. The MB won 34 seats in the first election round, exactly half of the NDP's 68. In the second round, the NDP garnered only 34 seats, losing a stunning 104. Ousted NDP candidates included a former deputy prime minister, four chairmen of parliamentary committees, and a party provincial secretary. To retain its crushing majority, the NDP eventually "readmitted" over 165 winning independents into its folds, sometimes without their permission.

Non-MB opposition candidates, on the other hand, failed miserably. The Nasserist Party failed to garner a single seat, while the historic Wafd Party won only six and the Tagammu- Party two. The nascent Ghad Party won one seat, while its head, Aymen Nour, first runner-up in the September presidential poll, lost his seat to an NDP opponent.

Members of progressive street movements venturing into direct political engagement also suffered dismal returns. Despite the charm of veteran activist Kamal Khalil's socialist-red posters with the slogan "Come to struggle" in wording reminiscent of the Muslim call to prayer, his district was won by an NDP candidate who more effectively made the rounds of local cafes with a parading troupe of traditional musicians and dancers. With the long-established opposition and leftist independents effectively eliminated from the race, it seemed the future of Egyptian politics would be determined by a pitched battle between the NDP and MB.

Analysts say the NDP's landslide losses and the concomitant gains of the MB triggered the regime's frantic resort to ever more extreme measures, from offering exorbitant fees for votes to releasing prison inmates with instructions to terrorize voters to dispatching riot squads to close down polling stations. The election process originally touted as a poster child of democratic reform quickly declined into chaos.

In Alexandria, the first casualty of the elections was stabbed to death, and a hired gang of women beat up an MB candidate. A female reporter for Al-Karama newspaper covering sorting procedures in Cairo was abducted, reportedly threatened with rape, beaten unconscious by female ex-cons and thrown under a downtown bridge. The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights reported 76 cases of supervising judges being attacked by police or hired thugs. Violence breeding violence, independent candidates and their supporters joined the fray, and voters in some districts fought back with Molotov cocktails and bricks. Al-Ahram Weekly quoted one resident of the Kafr Al-Sheikh Delta province saying, "When I left my shop to go cast my vote I was actually going to a battlefield. It looked the same as the ones we see on TV in occupied Palestine."

Al-Ahram Weekly also spoke with a Kafr Al-Sheikh fisherman frustrated by his failed attempts to vote for a prominent opposition MP, who, at the end of the day, lost his seat to the NDP opponent. "They have been talking about democracy, and the importance of fair elections, and we believed them, only to find out today that it was all lies," he said. After police insulted his wife, Gomaa Al-Zeftawy sent her home to their children, while he waited out the riot police blockade of the polling station. Police attempting to disperse the crowds later shot him dead, reportedly with live ammunition. Just half an hour before his killing, Al-Zeftawy summed up his voting experience to Al-Ahram Weekly: "Today was the most humiliating day of my life."

His last words expressed a sentiment seemingly shared by untold numbers of Egyptians. The 2005 parliamentary elections were a critical experiment in democratic reform gone terribly wrong. The higher the stakes, it turned out, the greater the losses.

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Jennifer Peterson is a free-lance journalist based in Cairo.

This article was published in the March 2006 edition of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. It is used here with permission.