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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 9 -15 November 2000 Issue No.507 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 9 -15 November 2000 Issue No.507
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Books Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters An electoral season
By Mohamed Sid-Ahmed
A flurry of presidential, parliamentary and municipal elections are now underway in a number of hot spots, each having its own specific cachet: presidential and congressional in the US, parliamentary in Egypt, presidential in Serbia, municipal in Kosovo, and a complete sham of an electoral process in Ivory Coast.
All are being conducted in the name of democracy, to which every regime must pay lip service in the context of globalisation if it aspires to full membership in the present world order. But how "democracy" is being applied in practice differs from one location to another. Actually, the democratic process itself raises a number of important questions. Take the case of the United States, for example, with a democratic tradition that is particularly well rooted in society -- and the world's most powerful arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. This means that the outcome of the American presidential election is of deep concern not only to Americans but to the entire world, which has every interest in seeing a wise man at the helm of the American body politic, not a reckless adventurer foolish enough to unleash the destructive power of the United States to the detriment of humankind as a whole. The problem is that the American electoral system has no in-built guarantees to ensure that the man elected as president of the United States will be wise enough not to expose the world to Armageddon.
The recent American electoral campaign has been particularly superficial. The debates between the two main contenders, Bush and Gore, were less than inspiring and noticeably short on substance. The campaign comes at a time of unprecedented prosperity in America. The economy is booming and, although social discrepancies have not been overcome, Americans as a whole have seen their living conditions improve under Clinton's two terms in power. However, Americans are pragmatic; unlike Europeans, they do not set great score by intellectuals. Their elites are, rather, specialists in innumerable specific fields of endeavour. The intelligentsia, with its encyclopaedic knowledge and abstract thinking, is regarded as a marginal, self-indulgent group whose endeavours have no practical consequence. In a way, Clinton, with his solid academic credentials, is an anomaly among American presidents. But despite his undeniable intellectual abilities, he often failed and found himself drifting because of sordid scandals unworthy of the most powerful man on earth.
As for the two men who vyed for his post, their academic backgrounds are modest, to say the least. Both were below-average students in college and neither was outstanding in any way. The mediocrity of the two contenders for what is arguably the most powerful office in the world confirms that American society only rarely produces presidents with notable qualities like Clinton.
Then we have Hillary Clinton who ran for the New York Senate seat in the hope that this will open a door for her future ambition to become America's first female president. Her privileged position as the president's wife was reflected in the size of her campaign funds, said to be running close to a hundred million dollars. Winning the election at any cost became her primary aim, even at the expense of her credibility and political consistency. Thus the woman who, on a visit to Gaza with her husband a couple of years ago came out strongly in favour of a Palestinian state, earning herself a standing ovation from the Palestinian parliament, recently announced that she was returning $50,000 raised for her campaign by the American Muslim Alliance, because they were supporting "terrorism," i.e., the Intifada. This shocking announcement, obviously designed to boost her credit rating with New York's strong Jewish constituency, reflects badly on democracy in America, where political consistency and principled stands are all too frequently sacrificed on the altar of expediency.
In Egypt, we are still trying to lay down the rules that will endow the electoral process with a democratic and constitutional character. The parliamentary elections have been marked by disputes and conflicts which received prominent coverage in the opposition press but were only timidly mentioned in the official press. However, thanks to the supervision of the judiciary, the elections have been freer and with a larger turnout than any previous elections over the last decades.
However, there is the problem of the ruling National Democratic Party, which appears to be going through some sort of identity crisis. Many of its members who wanted to run for reelection in the current campaign were denied party support because of their suspected involvement in irregularities which reached a peak with the scandal of the so-called "loan deputies" trial. But some chose to defy their party's directives and run as independents and, thanks to solid local connections, were re-elected. Many of these then offered the seats they had won as independents to the NDP which, having lost many of its previously held seats, was only too willing to reintegrate them into the party. One is entitled to wonder how the NDP can justify the reintegration of deputies it once considered unfit to represent it. Does its decision mean that they have been absolved of any wrongdoing, or does it simply mean that the party decided to overlook whatever misconduct they may have been guilty of? The NDP's U-turn was criticised by the opposition parties as misleading the electorate. It is also a clear sign that judicial supervision alone is not enough to correct distortions in the very identity of the ruling party.
Moreover, what exactly are the so-called "independents"? They are made up not only of candidates dropped from the NDP's electoral lists, but also of candidates with no party to refer to, neither the official nor the opposition parties. Many of these independents turned out to belong to the Islamic trend, in particular, to the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. This puts forward another dilemma; does the fact that they belong to an illegal party invalidated the legitimacy of their election, or does the fact that they are democratically elected invalidate the fact that their party is still regarded as illegal? Is it not preferable to legalise the Brotherhood and guarantee that its activities are within the legitimacy of the regime than allow its members to sit in Parliament while the organisation they belong to remains clandestine?
The time has come to recognise the dangers of allowing Egyptian society to be polarised between a ruling party whose identity is clouded by ambiguities and an outlawed opposition party (with more members in Parliament than any of the "legal" opposition parties), whose status is clouded by ambiguities.
Actually, these ambiguities and inconsistencies are not characteristic of the American -- or Egyptian -- elections only, but are widespread in many critical spots around the world. In Yugoslavia, for example, the West blamed Slobodan Milosevic for the country's desperately complicated problems. Milosevic was finally removed from office through democratic elections in which Vojislav Kostunica, a moderate opposition leader supported by the West, won a resounding victory. However, this development is not expected to solve Yugoslavia's problems and might, indeed, exacerbate them still further.
A crisis flared up because the Albanians of Kosovo are pressing for total independence from Serbia. Because NATO opposed Milosevic, it supported the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) with its extremist leader, Hashim Thacy, against the Serbs. But the West is committed to Security Council resolution 1244, which does not recognise Kosovo's independence, but only "extended self-rule." The municipal elections recently held in Kosovo resulted in a sweeping victory (two thirds of the votes) for moderate Ibrahim Rugova, who was running against the extremist Thacy. The fact that moderates were elected in both Serbia and Kosovo was hailed as a step in the direction of solving Yugoslavia's many complex problems. But there are already signs that Kostunica and Rugova's shared moderation has not bridged the gap between them on the question of Kosovo's independence, proving that in the context of Yugoslavia's complicated multi-ethnic composition the removal of Milosevic is not sufficient in itself to ensure an end to these problems.
Inconsistencies are still more apparent when it comes to Ivory Coast. This equatorial African country enjoyed relative stability for decades under Felix Houphouet-Boigny when its exports (especially cocoa) sold well, but its situation deteriorated as prices went down and its ethnic equilibrium was disturbed by in-comers from poorer neighbouring countries (mainly Muslims). Ethnic problems exploded, especially between the Muslim North and the Christian South, encouraging an adventurous general, Robert Guei to stage a coup last December. When he announced his intention to seize state power, he was ousted by widespread popular demonstrations. He fled, but his escape did not bring Ivory Coast's problems to an end. Inter-ethnic strife is still going on between the elected Christian president Laurent Gbagbo and the Muslim Northern leader Draman Quattara, resulting in widespread bloodshed and the slaughter of many innocent people.
Thus theories about the "end of history," which posit that conflict is a thing of the past now that democracy has discovered the golden formula acceptable by all, have been largely discredited. It is becoming increasingly obvious that massive efforts are needed before the principle of democracy can be translated into a workable recipe valid whatever the diversity of objective conditions in which it will have to operate.
Related stories:
Who is the most Zionist of all?
Another bad day at the office 2 - 8 November 2000
Ruling party 'out of touch' 2 - 8 November 2000
See International
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