WATANI International
20 November 2011
The run up to the People’s Assembly (PA) elections, due to start on 28 November, has been plagued by a host of obstacles including the general state of national insecurity and wide disagreement among political forces over priorities and schedule during the transitional period. Indeed, the document on the guiding principles of the new Constitution recently released by the government has only added to the turmoil, given the opposition it received from the political forces on the Islamic front.
No women quota
The elections will be held on three stages, with at least nine governorates in each stage, and will combine slate and individual candidacy systems. The High Elections Committee (HEC) says 149 electoral symbols have been approved, while the camel and crescent, the symbols of the erstwhile ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), are now banned. Independent nominees count 6,591, while electoral lists stand at 590. In the 2010 PA elections, there were 5,033 candidates and there was no place for a slate system. Now there is no place for a women’s quota—the pre-revolutionary PA reserved 32 seats for women. Against 222 constituencies in the 2010 elections with two deputies for each, the current elections show 83 constituencies for individual candidates and 46 for the lists.
The number of political parties contesting the elections amounts to 47, against 23 prior to the revolution. Two major coalitions have been formed: the Islamist-leaning Democratic Alliance and the liberal Egyptian Block.
Liberals and Islamists
The Wafd Party is contesting the elections with 332 candidates on electoral lists, and 96 individual candidates, among whom are 37 Copts on electoral lists and three individual candidates.
The left-leaning Tagammu Party, part of the Egyptian Block is fielding 332 nominees in 46 constituencies.
Newly formed parties seem to be the winning horse in the elections. The liberal Free Egyptians Party has nominated 498 candidates, running for all the seats. The Egyptian Social Democratic Party is fielding 166 candidates, including 26 women and 12 Copts. The two parties are the founders of the Egyptian Block.
On the other side of the divide lie the Islamic parties. The Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, is the biggest of them and the main force in the Democratic Alliance, which includes 10 parties. The FJP has acquired 70 per cent of the Alliance’s lists and issued a statement saying it would contest all the seats in both slate and individual candidacy systems.
Despite the evident Islamic/secular polarisation, each camp has its own divisions. The Islamists, for instance, are distributed in three to four lists. The same can be said of the seculars.
Islamic ethics
In a pursuit to coordinate with other Islamic parties, the FJP has signed an honour code with the Nour (‘Light’) Salafi party to stress the Islamic current’s commitment to abide by the ethics of Islam. This implies avoiding tarnishing the images of candidates or making baseless accusations against contesters. The two groups have agreed to join forces against acts of thuggery.
Among the parties of Islamic reference that preferred not to join the Democratic Alliance is Wassat, which fielded 70 individual candidates and 322 candidates on its lists for 46 constituencies. The party issued a statement saying that its list included two Copts. The total number of women fielded by the party—including both individual candidates and those on the party’s lists—amounts to 69.
The Salafi Nour and Assala parties have joined forces with the Construction and Development Party, the political arm of the Islamic Jamaa, to form a unified list with 36 candidates. Sameh al-Gazzar of Nour says that the party has not fielded any Copts because none had joined the party. The Maspero events, he went on to say, had further dissuaded Copts from joining the party.
Remnants
The HEC, for its part, has determined the rules regulating the process of the elections, the measures for permitting journalists and NGO representatives to follow the process, and the rules nominees have to abide by in their campaigns. Accordingly, candidates are committed to a host of obligations including: avoidance of talk about other candidates’ private lives; preserving national unity and refraining from using slogans with a religious character; and not using State-owned institutions, public enterprises or means of transport in campaigning. It is also banned to receive money from foreign individuals or organisations. The maximum budget for each individual and party is EGP500,000 and EGP1million respectively.
Violating the aforementioned rules invalidates a nominee’s candidature.
Individual candidate lists include many ex NDP members, or filool (remnants) as they have come to be known, since most are wealthy enough to finance individual campaigns. Yet most newly formed parties were reluctant to put them on their lists given that they are frequently alleged to have “sown the seeds of political corruption”, even though it is also admitted that the majority of them—whose numbers run to some three million individuals—were not corrupt.
The issue of the right of filool to run for parliament, however, gave rise to huge controversy and was only resolved by the Supreme Administrative Court last week. The court ruled that they had a right to contest the elections; the public had the final say of who to send to parliament.
Turning point
Elections to the Shura Council— the upper consultative house— will take place immediately following the PA elections. The number of individual candidates for the council amounts to 2,036, while there are 272 lists.
The electoral process will end in mid-March next year, and the upper and lower houses of the new parliament will choose the committee charged with drafting the Constitution. Once this is in place, Egypt can go on to elect a president, a process foreseen to take place in 2013. It is no exaggeration, therefore, to conclude that the coming elections will be a turning point in the process of democratic transformation in Egypt.