Egypt's elections

Now that Egypt's Parliamentary elections are sputtering to the end, what to make of them?     As everyone knows, the Muslim Brotherhood will probably end up with more than 100 seats, while the secular opposition almost completely disappeared.  This really shouldn't have come as a surprise - even if the regime did its part to fragment and cheat the secular opposition, they never posed much of a threat.  The MB probably would have done even better were it not for the regime's escalating violence, intimidation, and shenanigans - now including closing polling stations in MB strongholds in Alexandria and in upper Egypt, violence against would-be voters, and the arrest of up to 2000 MB activists (putting a lie to the claim made at the outset of the first round that for the first time, elections were held without any MB members in custody).

The MB's electoral success is not in and of itself a negative outcome. This isn't the first time that the MB has done well in an Arab election (see Jordan 1989 and 1993), and hopefully it won't be the last.  A lot of us on all sides of the debate have argued for a long time that the MB should be brought into the political process, giving them responsibility and a stake in the system.   It would let the MB prove its willingness to play by the rules.  And reasonably fair and free elections would allow a Parliament to roughly reflect the real distribution of power on the ground, making the institution more credible and more relevant to people's lives.   This is certainly the argument that the Ikhwan itself is making.

Unfortunately, I'd say that the above analysis also depended on the regime proving that it could play by the rules.  And here, the real story is less the MB's performance than the regime's.   That the Muslim Brothers now enter Parliament aggrieved and embittered, believing that the regime broke its promises of free and fair elections, will undoubtedly color their behavior within the legislature.    All eyes will be on the Muslim Brotherhood Parliamentarians, as a leading indicator on the various "Islamism and democracy" debates.   But that indicator starts off with a negative balance, since the "democracy" part has already been deeply compromised. 

The way the elections played out also will reinforce Arab and Egyptian skepticism about the regime's intentions or about the reality of change.  That Egyptians and Arabs everywhere saw the shenanigans unfold - and that the judges walked out in protest, refusing to certify some of the results - means that they have little reason to believe that anything has fundamentally changed. 

Hopes for a democratic domino effect, where televised images of voting Egyptians inspire other Arabs to demand the same, are long gone.  Al-Jazeera and even al-Hurra (which benefits from a talented Egyptian correspondent) have shown the regime's depradations in such graphic detail that few Arabs will come away inspired.  Predictably, the Egyptian regime has respnded by arresting the al-Jazeera team, and Issandr el-Amrani notes that al-Jazeera appears to be jammed in Egypt right now, perhaps because they are showing riots in Mansoura.  This isn't the first time -  Reuters reports that a number of journalists are getting arrested and roughed up for their coverage. 

And here's the kicker:  the Bush administration did belatedly, and rather meekly, complain about the violence and call on the Egyptian regime to keep the elections honest.   And the Egyptians simply ignored it.   So much for American credibility. 

Baheyya gives the best case for optimism:  the Egyptian voters fought through the shenanigans and dealt the NDP a setback, and their new sense of empowerment won't be easily taken away.  I'm less convinced.  These elections gave a real opportunity to show genuine progress towards democracy in the Arab world, in a way that the absurd Presidential election never really did.  That opportunity is lost.   Nobody should be allowed to appropriate these elections as part of any "freedom on the march" narrative.  Those hopes went up in smoke somewhere between the gangs of NDP thugs beating up voters in Ikhwan neighborhoods and the shuttering of the voting stations in others.   These elections look an awful lot like the 2000 elections, only the Muslim Brotherhood is now stronger and more politically daring.   

UPDATE:  al-Jazeera reports that to this point results have been announced for only 9 of the 136 seats voted on yesterday, with a new vote scheduled for next Wednesday.   No Ikhwan candidates were among the nine declared winners, and the MB is calling foul - amazing how installing armed cordons around the polling stations will keep the vote down.   The judges are warning that they will refuse to monitor any future elections if things keep going like this. 

And, as praktike points out, the Bush administration, in the person of Scott McLellan, had this to say:  "I think that we have not received, at this point, any indication that the Egyptian Government isn’t interested in having peaceful, free and fair elections."   Too bad you weren't watching al-Jazeera.

Lots of good pictures here, at Misr Digital -  even if you can't read the Arabic text, you can figure out what's going on.

Comments

[Nur al-Cubicle]

Great "keeper" AP photo today of Egyptian voters in Bussat climbing into the polling station through the back bathroom window because police had the front cordoned off.

[issandr]

I still maintain that there were no MBs in jail at the beginning of the elections, and Essam El Erian, a prominent MB, told me this himself. (I will confirm it over the next few days again in meetings with other MB officials). It was also reported in Al Hayat and perhaps elsewhere. The arrest of MBs only started to happen later -- during the second round of the elections, I believe. This would suggest that the regime was taken aback by the MB's success (as we all were!) and changed its policy in midstream. The speculation in Cairo is that the handling of the election was taken over from Gamal and his gang by the security types, but I don't know whether there's any truth in this.

[Scott MacMillan]

You meant McCormack at the State Dept., not McClellan at the White House. Good post anyway.