Secret vote
A somewhat sudden by-election in Abdeen strips the sole Liberal Party MP of his parliamentary seat
Late on Sunday evening, the press received a fax announcing that Talaat El- Qawwas and Hosni Badawi of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) had just won a landslide victory in the parliamentary by-election for the downtown Cairo district of Abdeen, reports Gamal Essam El-Din . The very brief announcement, written by the Interior Ministry, reported that El-Qawwas and Badawi had crushed their two rivals (the Wafd party's Abdel-Aziz Gharib and the Liberal party's Ragab Hilal Hemeida, the district's parliamentary representative from 1995-January 2003) by a vote of 4821 and 4774 to 141 and 224, respectively.
The fax was stunning in many respects. For one thing, all signs had pointed to a postponement of the Sunday by-election in Abdeen, since an Administrative Court had just ruled against the Interior Ministry's selection of the date. The court said the ministry had violated the 1956 electoral rights law, which stipulates that by-election dates must be announced 45 days in advance. What the media and the public were not aware of, however, was that the State Cases Authority (an official body responsible for handling government- related court cases) had filed an appeal against the administrative court ruling so that the by-election could take place as scheduled anyway.
Perhaps much more surprising, though, was the vast difference between Sunday's results and those of the original 2000 elections, when Badawi only got 850 votes to Hemeida's 4904. In fact, Hemeida had soundly defeated Badawi in both 1995 and 2000.
How, asked the pundits, had an NDP candidate managed to transform two resounding defeats into such a landslide victory? The answer, according to independent and opposition MPs, is clear: the Abdeen by- election was manipulated by the government to strip Hemeida -- who had been deemed a troublemaker after a high- profile 11 January verbal clash with Prime Minister Atef Ebeid over banking corruption -- of his seat.
While El-Qawwas praised the by- election's integrity, Hemeida said that he and his supporters had been completely barred from participating.
In any case, the by-election itself seemed a mere formality. The manner by which Hemeida was originally ousted from the assembly, the critics say, bears a remarkable similarity to the way Muslim Brotherhood MP Gamal Heshmat -- also considered a troublemaker by the government -- lost his seat as well. First, a plenary meeting was held on 4 February so that the assembly's NDP majority could vote to remove Hemeida from the assembly based on a Cassation Court ruling that invalidated the results of his 2000 victory. Similar court rulings are common, usually the result of complaints filed by disgruntled losing candidates. The problem, critics say, is that the NDP-dominated parliament is rather selective about when and where it decides to follow through on the rulings.
In the Hemeida case, it did: hence the by-election in Abdeen.
Hemeida's defeat has already made its mark on opposition politicians, confirming their view that the NDP will continue to selectively decide which election complaints to follow up on. According to independent MP Adel Eid, when such tactics take place, the biggest losers are Egypt's democracy and political life as a whole.
Opposition politicians think the same tactics may soon target Kamal Ahmed, a Nasserist-oriented independent MP from Alexandria who clashed with Prime Minister Atef Ebeid in front of parliamentary TV cameras last year. In Ahmed's case, the Cassation Court recently invalidated the results of the 2000 elections in the Alexandria district of El- Atareen, based on a complaint filed by a losing candidate for another of the district's seats. The court's ruling, however, could be implemented in a way that would require by-elections for the entire district, and thus affect Ahmed.
The NDP, meanwhile, is also having problems with its own deputies. MPs Bahaa El-Miligy and Hussein Eweiss from El-Fayoum were recently sentenced to 15 and 5 years in prison, respectively, for forging official documents and misappropriating public funds, and the assembly will be ratifying their expulsion next week. That will bring the number of deputies stripped of their membership during this parliamentary session to eight.
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 6 - 12 March 2003 (Issue No. 628)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/628/eg5.htm