Elections for Egypt’s new Parliament are ongoing. The Senate elections started last July, the runoffs are expected tomorrow, and the official results will be announced in September. Elections for the House of Representatives will follow so that, by next November, the new Parliaments’ two chambers would have been elected.
For now, we need to take a good look at the results of the Senate elections if we are truly serious about the measures and standards that govern political participation in Egypt.
The voter turnout for the first round of the Senate elections was a mere 17.1 per cent. Given that the lowest percentage that reflects true popular participation is at least 50 per cent of registered voters, the 17.1 per cent turnout was cause for serious concern. The alarmingly low turnout indicates that Egyptians are refraining from voting; this challenges political leaders to determine the reasons behind that, and to consequently address the underlying problems. There are real concerns that a swamp of frustration is separating the public from those who should be representing them before the State, addressing their legislative needs, and enacting effective solutions to their dire living conditions. No surprise here, for what is the point of parliamentary representation if it does not translate the needs and aspirations of the people into on-the-ground laws that get relayed to the executive authority to alleviate the public’s suffering? If parliamentary representation falls short of this role, a significant gap is created between its formal presence and its representation of the electoral base. This is the real calamity we now face in Egypt; the results of the first round of Senate elections cry out in our face: “Don’t fool yourselves!”
The gap between “political representation” and “public representation” is getting ever wider, epitomising the catastrophic absent public representation from our parliamentary life. It begs answers for a series of interconnected questions: Where is political representation? Where is party representation? Where is the platform that expresses the aspirations of the masses not those of the authorities? Where is the public representation in Parliament that can firmly and effectively impose its will on political decisions?
The issue is a significant, critical one which I repeatedly addressed over the years; I now find myself compelled to recall it. The core of the issue is party representation on the political map, the size of that representation and the strength of its effectiveness.
Whereas the Egyptian political map boasts the freedom to establish parties by notification—it has produced some 120 political parties so far—it falls short of ensuring real political weight for party representation in Egyptian political life. This owes to the state of isolation, dispersion and fragmentation of the Egyptian political party scene, sadly resulting in a lack of capacity or meaningful influence when it comes to genuine participation in shaping performance or decision-making.
In this context, I go back to faithful national appeals I previously made, calling for the urgent need to establish a new reality—one that moves beyond a state of superficial partisan abundance, rich in form yet barren in impact. The goal was to consolidate effective party representation capable of engaging with the Egyptian public and playing a genuine national role in connecting with the Egyptian voter. I acknowledge that the current party map is marked by excessive pluralism, driven by the ease of forming political parties through mere notification regardless of the actual weight or influence of their representation. This is largely due to the absence of effective mechanisms to assess the strength of party blocs and their real engagement with the Egyptian public. I have repeatedly emphasised what I previously documented from President Sisi’s own words during his meeting with the editors-in-chief of Egypt’s national newspapers in May 2017. The President said: “I have more than once called upon parties with similar agendas and political views to merge, in order to create [a few] strong parties [instead of numerous, conflicting feeble ones]. Only then will the parties produce calibres that qualify for power rotation. I wish to see parties with the same ideologies strive towards collaboration and mergers.” I wrote about this issue in my editorials, but saw no tangible change on the party map; my editorials which tackled this very issue are dated: 29/10/2017; 28/01/2018; 25/02/2018; 22/04/2018; 27/05/2018; 14/10/2018; 03/02/2019; 19/12/2019; 29/07/2020. I even wrote: “I believe the role of the Party Affairs Committee should be redrafted to include measures necessary to achieve mergers between parties, so that we end up with three or four strong party coalitions. The alignment of parties that embrace similar ideologies and platforms under a single coalition is the most important of these measures.” I repeatedly wondered in case the Party Affairs Committee fails to achieve this, whether the President would empower his prerogative to issue directives to achieve that. This remains an open question seeing the political apathy and incapacity of the party map. This reality is evident in the low voter turnout during this year’s Senate elections and the looming prospect of a similar outcome in the upcoming elections for the House of Representatives.
We are before a serious national responsibility that no political force or temporary bloc that claims to possess artificial majority can afford to ignore. The point is not about securing narrow electoral victories that lack genuine popular backing, but about the imperative to build voting majorities that truly reflect the will of the people.
Watani International
22 August 2025
