WATANI International
9 May 2010
“Democracy status in Egypt 2009”, the title of the third annual report issued by the Egyptian Association for Community Participation Enhancement (EACPE), was discussed in a press conference held by the Democracy Status Watch (DSW) last month. The report is the culmination of an entire phase of work during which DSW team observed different elections that took place in Egypt during the three years from 2007 to 2009.
The report raises an important question: “Are elections in Egypt a real mechanism for peaceful transfer of power?”
Power rotation
The report was reviewed during a recent conference held in Cairo by EACPE. Attending the conference were Magdy Abdel-Hamid, chairman of EACPE, Ahmed Fawzy, director of the Democracy Development Programme in Egypt (EACPE) and himself a lawyer, as well as a number of prominent figures in the field. Among them were the leading leftist and researcher in the Arab Research Centre Abdel-Ghaffar Shukr; Amr al-Shobaki, author and an expert at Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies; and Gamal Abdel-Aziz, director of the Arab Network for Human Rights.
Mr Fawzy began by pointing out that the EACPE tried to monitor and supervise all elections that have taken place in Egypt in 2009 but, he said, it failed to monitor some of them. The elections of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was marred by a number of suspected irregularities that included the exclusion of a number of reformers, were not monitored by EACPE, he said.
The report, Mr Fawzy said, concluded that general elections in Egypt were supposed to be a peaceful mechanism for rotation of power, but unfortunately in this country it was not so. The situation in Egypt lacked the international standards that governed any fair election in the world.
The role of the intellectual and political elite in the electoral process was weak and limited, the report declared, describing it as limited to charging the electing process of fraud, while playing no role to help fight such fraud.
No Copts
“Concerning the status of elections in Egypt in terms of nomination and election,” Mr Fawzy said, “the report revealed a decline of the rate of participation of Copts, whether in nomination or in balloting. No Coptic candidate whatever stood in some elections, such as in case of the syndicates of the lawyers and the acting professions.”
The report emphasised that there was great disregard for women and Copts in the community as a result of the prevailing climate of hostility towards Copts and of resistance to the empowerment of women.
The highest percentage of participation in elections was among sports clubs proving, he said, that Egyptians are not indifferent to political participation once they are sure elections are free and fair and would bring to office persons who would make a difference.
Political mobility
Commenting on the report, Mr Shukr said that, in his opinion, it achieved three goals. It enabled the citizen to judge on the elections in Egypt according to the facts and documents. It highlighted the flaws in the electoral process. Third, it could help form a compelling public opinion to achieving fair elections in Egypt.
Sporting club elections, Mr Shukr said, gave an important indicator of a high voting turnout in elections from 27 per cent to 77 per cent. This destroyed the theory of the Egyptian regime, which accused the people of apathy.
Egypt already has in place a law governing political rights, he said, but it was in need of reform. A bill that gained the approval of 100-members of the People’s Assembly has not yet been debated, he said.
Mr Shukr called for the abolition of the emergency law to allow for more political mobility, and criticised the absence of political will in the ruling regime to make real change in the community. “Elections at the present time”, he said, “are the mechanism for greater monopoly on power”. Mr Shukr also criticised the political parties’ involvement in “farcical election” and emphasised that parties should boycott the elections because participation revealed a lack of integrity and meant backing the dictatorship. He called for a public alliance to boycott the upcoming elections.
“Troubling and alarming”
For his part, Dr Shobaki said that a lot of electoral fraud was perpetrated by members of the ruling National Democratic Party against members of the same party, a practice that featured competition between wings of the same system. This meant there was a lack of a transparent and fair system.
The report was “troubling and alarming”, according to Mr Abdel-Aziz, and meant that the Egyptian State was about to forge the next election. He criticised the State’s insistence refraining for making changes to the current Constitution, even though the Egyptian Constitution had been changed several times following the 1952 Revolution. This meant that the Constitution could be changed easily if there was political will to change it.