WATANI International
5 December 2010
Today Egyptian voters head to the ballot boxes for the runoff to last Sunday’s parliamentary elections which brought a wide majority of National Democratic Party (NDP) candidates to the People’s Assembly (PA)—the lower house of Egypt’s Parliament. The new PA already has 217 NDP MPs; two from the liberal Wafd party; one each from the leftist Tagammu, the liberal Ghad and Adaala; and three independents. The runoff will include 377 NDP candidates, 140 independents, and 16 candidates from opposition parties. As Watani International went to press, it was announced that the Wafd would pull out of the runoff to protest widespread fraud and thuggery. Its nine candidates in the runoff were told they could run as independents. The Muslim Brotherhood (MB), which is legally banned from political activity on grounds that it is a religious group but its members contest elections as independents, and which had 27 members in the runoff, also pulled out.
Invalid
The general secretariat of the PA was busy last week receiving the new MPs, completing the procedures of the new membership and handing each—as is the custom with new MPs—a copy of the Constitution and a copy of the PA’s regulatory code. An elected MP becomes a member of Parliament the instant he wins the election but only becomes an active MP after taking the constitutional oath.
Last Sunday’s elections took place in a tense atmosphere especially in constituencies where MB candidates ran. The MB has accused the government of widespread fraud against its candidates, none of whom won.
Many constituencies in which Coptic candidates ran, including Shubra and Downtown Cairo, saw calm elections.
The Wafd officially declared several instances of fraud against its candidates, mostly in constituencies outside Cairo. The party said it filed an official complaint with the High Electoral Committee (HEC) against what it described as the manoeuvring of votes by the vote-counting committee in Girga in Sohag, Upper Egypt. After it was announced that Wafd candidate Mounir Fakhry Abdel-Nour had won the Girga seat, the committee announced it was excluding 20 ballot boxes from the vote count, accordingly Abdel-Nour lost. The party said the move invalidates the vote count.
There were wide complaints against the banning of representatives of opposition candidates from accessing balloting stations.
Violations
Three persons from Cairo, Menoufiya, and Upper Egypt lost their lives in election-related incidents. The Egyptian coalition for monitoring the elections, which includes 123 NGOs, said the violence was less than that in the 2005 elections which saw 17 killed, and that it was perpetrated by over-zealous electioneering not by the security forces who were described as having maintained a stance of impartiality.
The coalition said that several monitors who belonged to Egyptian NGOs were not allowed to access balloting stations even though they held official permits. The National Council for Human Rights intervened to resolve 425 complaints. Further violations included vote stuffing and voter bribing.
And even though the use of religious slogans was banned, the MB spread their “Islam is the answer” posters in the smaller side streets that escape the security’s eyes. But several non-MB candidates used Qur’anic verses of the type “If God give you victory no one can defeat you” to grace their banners.