Problems on hold

In an interview with a Russian newspaper on the eve of his visit to Russia, President Mubarak said: “Western-style democracy is not de facto universally applicable regardless of time and place; each society has its own brand of democratic experience consistent with its own state of affairs’. The President’s statement prompted me to attempt a tracing of the features of Egyptian democracy, supposedly consistent with society’s conditions. It was then that I realised the announcement was intended as a justification or an apology for the absence of democracy in our country. When I looked around the non-Western world, I found democratic models in Turkey, India, Pakistan, Mali, Taiwan, and many other countries where the people’s will was realised by peacefully choosing their leaders and representatives via ballot boxes.
So what is the problem with Egypt? It has nothing to do with freedom of expression, but with the non-existent mechanism for change or power rotation. Whenever the topic of absent power rotation crops up, it is branded as a Western tradition. Egyptian democracy, it is said, has to be authentic, stemming from society’s values and traditions. Yet evading pluralism and power rotation has become an established feature of our political life; a situation that is becoming increasingly difficult to justify.
Whenever elections approach we are inundated by glossy, hollow slogans of the type: “A more effective role for political parties in political life”, “fair representation for all public sectors”, and “empowerment of women”. Yet facts on the ground are exactly opposite. Whenever a serious political alternative looms on the horizon and appears to pose a real threat to the dominion of the ruling party, tolerance is thrown to the wind and all the means at hand are employed by the ruling regime to crush the budding movement.
Amazingly, that suppressive attitude does not now solely apply to the opposition, but is now rampant within the ranks of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) itself. Several promising NDP members have been sidelined in the upcoming municipalities elections. The NDP leaders and decision-makers appear to be preoccupied with winning all the seats of municipal councils and excluding all ‘other’. Only now the ‘other’ does not come from outside the NDP but may be an NDP woman, Copt or young man, who are excluded from running the elections on grounds that their chances at winning may be uncertain. The party’s decision-makers prefer to field candidates with family and tribal leverage rather than those who depend in their electoral campaign on the party’s platform and politics. Empty slogans of equal representation are put aside since the workable slogan is “the end justifies the means”.
“The end justifies the means” may be fully acceptable in genuine democracies in the West or in other parts of the world when competing parties may fight for 30 or 40 per cent of the votes, and form coalitions with other parties to win a place in the legislative body. In such cases, no party can afford to field a candidate with uncertain chances. But this is not the case in the upcoming municipal elections, for the ruling NDP is sure to control 90 per cent of the seats. The party then could have taken the risk of nominating 10 per cent of candidates with uncertain opportunities, to demonstrate a stance with balanced representation and accepting the other. But such an attitude requires political imagination and broad mindedness.
The policy of the NDP, backed by the security apparatus, has managed to empty the scene of competitors; a situation that implies that the municipal councils are corrupted before they are born; polling stations are expected to be void of voters.
I have received a host of complaints from active NDP members who were excluded from contesting the elections, for being young, women or Copts. I will present the cases in detail once the elections scheduled for 8 April end.
I dedicate this article to all those who stood against assigning quotas for women, Copts or young people. I believe that in cases of the absence of political imagination, positive discrimination remains the only effective mechanism for the emergence of a brand of democracy consistent with our society’s norms.

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