Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 26 Oct. - 1 Nov. 2000 Issue No. 505
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

	Egypt Palestine International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters

Election surprises defy pundits

By Amira Howeidy

The results of the first round of parliamentary elections on 18 October challenged the traditional assumption that they never contain surprises. Two members of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood convincingly won in the Mina Al-Bassal constituency of Alexandria, and the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) was dealt a blow when only 21 out of its 150 candidates won seats. The remainder had to wait until Tuesday's run-offs to find out whether they would in fact be elected.

Just a few hours into those run-off elections, there were reports of sporadic violence. Although it is too early to determine what the final shape of the coming parliament will look like, the results of the first round reveal that the NDP has been shaken. The fact that the elections were carried out under full judicial supervision left little justification for cries of fraud.

The first of the three voting stages involved 150 parliamentary seats. The second stage will take place on 29 October, the third on 14 November. A total of 1,262 candidates competed in the first stage in 75 constituencies throughout nine governorates: Alexandria, Beheira, Menoufiya, Suez, Port Said, Ismailia, Fayoum, Sohag and Qena. The results in many areas were inconclusive and a run-off round for 118 seats was held on Tuesday.

According to results announced by the Interior Ministry, only 32 candidates won seats in the first round of 18 October. Roughly one third of winners were independents and opposition candidates. In other words, 11 non-NDP candidates won: seven independents, two from the Muslim Brotherhood, and one each from the Nasserist and Tagammu parties.

"I've never seen anything like this," said Diaa Rashwan, a senior researcher at the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies who observed the first round from inside polling stations as a proxy for a candidate running in Qena. "In previous polls, everything was rigged -- by the NDP and the others. If you didn't rig, you didn't win. But there was nothing like that this time and the judges were very strict," Rashwan told Al-Ahram Weekly.

Even opposition candidates, such as the Brotherhood's Ali Abdel-Fattah, hailed the judicial supervision as the "real winner in the elections". However, the outlawed group was the most vocal about government harassment because more than 80 of their supporters and proxies were arrested. This led Jihan El-Halafawi, the first Muslim Brotherhood female candidate to run for election, to file a lawsuit demanding the cancellation of the elections in her constituency of Al-Raml in Alexandria. On the eve of the poll, El-Halafawi won a court ruling declaring the elections in Al-Raml illegal and ordering their postponement. However the government, using a legal technicality, went ahead with the poll anyway. The surprise was that both El-Halafawi and El-Mohammedi Sayed Ahmed, also a Brotherhood candidate running for the workers' seat, together gained the largest number of votes: 6,964 out of a total 11,163. The judicial committee in charge, however, announced that the results were inconclusive because neither gained 50 per cent of the vote. A run-off was therefore held. To the amazement of all, Interior Minister Habib El-Adli then ordered the cancellation of the run-off ballot in Al-Raml in deference to the original court order. The Brotherhood interpreted this as "an attempt to prevent El-Halafawi and Ahmed from running because they gained the highest number of votes and so are very likely to win in the run-off poll."

Meanwhile, Hamdi El-Sayed and Hussein Mohamed, both Brotherhood candidates in the Mina Al-Bassal constituency of Alexandria, scored an overwhelming victory in the first round, winning 6,503 votes out of a total 8,336 votes.

However, there were no surprises in the constituencies of two of the most influential cabinet ministers and prominent NDP figures, Agriculture Minister Youssef Wali (Ebshway, Fayoum) and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kamal El-Shazli (Bagour, Menoufiya). The former won uncontested; the latter with a great majority.

In the Menoufiya constituency of Menouf, the NDP's business tycoon Ahmed Ezz outvoted Ibrahim Kamel, a businessman and an independent. Predicted NDP victories followed in Alexandria's Sidi Gaber constituency with Tarek Talaat, the son of construction tycoon Talaat Mustafa, and El-Sayed Rashed, head of the Egyptian Trade Union Federation, capturing two seats. The defeat of Sameh Ashour, a Nasserist MP in the out-going parliament, did however come as a surprise.

In Suez city, all four NDP candidates failed to make it even to the runoff round.

Compared to previous polls, the results of the first round represented a relative setback for the NDP, with independents and opposition candidates making a good show.

"If we measure the weight of the political forces in light of the results of the first round, the NDP will come first followed by the Muslim Brotherhood, despite the large gap between the two," Rashwan argued. He warned, however, that the two seats won by the Brotherhood were a cause for "frustration on part of the security forces which may have a backlash in store for the second and third stages."

Indeed, strict police measures and harassment by security forces of Brotherhood candidates and their supporters were reported subsequently in the run-off round.

Other analysts gave more cautious readings of the first-round results. Mustafa Kamel El-Sayed, a political science professor at Cairo University, argued that despite reports on the lack of any fraud inside polling stations, many other conditions have to be met before the conclusion is reached that the vote was clean. This includes equal access to the media and the neutrality of the authorities are conditions still not being met, he explained. Moreover, he added that there are complaints about the accuracy of the voters' registration lists, "many of which contain names of dead people, while many who have the right to vote didn't find their names on the lists."

El-Sayed also found in the victory of two Brotherhood candidates in the first round an indication that the "general climate of this election was much better than was previously the case." He expressed regret however that "there was no political debate. It wasn't fought around political platforms, but rather about local issues and what each candidate would offer in terms of services to voters in his or her constituency."

The fact that the Brotherhood contested the first round, winning two seats and getting nine candidates into the run-off, was viewed by El-Sayed as proof that the group "still possesses an active and functioning organisation." On the other hand, the harassment of the Brotherhood, he argued, "gave them the image of being martyrs. And Egyptians, in general, sympathise with victims. One must admire their organisational and tactical skills."

Contrary to Rashwan, El-Sayed found the NDP in a less troublesome situation. "I see no reason why its two-third majority should be threatened. It has become customary for independent candidates who do not run on the NDP ticket to re-join the party after the poll," he said.

---

Related stories:
Tougher times for the NDP
Second act, same drama
See Elections 2000

 

© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved

	weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg