Washington Report, November 2005, pages 34-35

Cairo Communiqué

It’s “In With the Old” After Egypt’s Presidential Election

By Jennifer Peterson

	An Egyptian boy rides his bicycle in front of a polling station Sept. 7, during the country’s first contested presidential election (AFP photo/Khaled Desouki).

USUALLY A drab and dusty Cairo junction where the fountain never flows, Kit Kat Square was suddenly transformed in early September. Pots of palms and other greenery crowded its concrete roundabout, providing a lush backdrop for its new installation—a larger-than-life statue of President Hosni Mubarak, his right arm raised in salute. Spotlights and red velvet ropes set off the elevated centerpiece, while overhead a hand-painted sign read “In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.”

The rest of the square was festooned in brightly colored election banners, most in support of Mubarak, who had already been head of state for 24 years. One sign, strung across six lanes of traffic, declared Mubarak the choice of this working class neighborhood’s intellectuals, laborers and even teenage girls.

By mid-September, however, the potted plants, statue, and most of the banners had disappeared. Mubarak had won the Sept. 7 presidential poll, and Kit Kat Square was now dustier than ever as local traffic police expanded their sidewalk headquarters, forcing pedestrians further into the busy street.

Mixed Messages

Following months of orchestrated suspense and last-minute delays, Mubarak finally announced he was running for president only the day before the nomination process began. From his hometown in the rural Delta and between disruptive cheers of support, Mubarak recounted his long military and political career before describing the development challenges he would tackle in a fifth presidential term. He also promised to replace Egypt’s draconian emergency law, instituted following the assassination of Anwar Sadat and in force throughout Mubarak’s rule, with “anti-terror” legislation.

The following day, however, anti-Mubarak protests in downtown Cairo were brutally squashed by security forces and plainclothes intelligence agents wielding batons. Three protesters were hospitalized in critical condition and at least 23 were imprisoned, as allowed by the emergency law that prohibits public assembly. Demonstrators were instructed that street dissent no longer would be tolerated, but once it was realized what an international public relations disaster these measures presented, subsequent street protests were treated with kid gloves.

Mubarak’s official election campaign was slick in appearance and run by a team of young professionals. Shiny posters throughout Cairo, one entirely draping a central downtown building, featured the president in shirtsleeves grasping a pen, and touted the slogan “Leadership…and the Passage to the Future.” Yet his platform consisted mainly of material promises for new housing, hospitals and employment, as well as drastically increased salaries for public servants. Coherent steps for political reform were generally absent from Mubarak’s electoral program, as was, noticeably, plans to tackle Egypt’s systemic corruption.

In keeping with the material focus of his campaign promises were the carrot-and-stick voting incentives reported by the independent press and human rights organizations. According to journalists and civil society observers, those who cast their ballot for Mubarak were promised meals, cash compensation, schoolbags, electronics, and a chance to win a paid pilgrimage to Mecca. Some villagers disclosed to human rights groups that they had been told the president would know which villages had supported him in the poll and that they alone would benefit from future development projects. Other voters were intimidated by threats of a 100 L.E. fine being levied on those who didn’t vote at all.

Further complicating the democratic process was the bewildering lineup of candidates running against Mubarak. Of the 30 individuals who submitted nomination papers, only ten were accepted as meeting the strict requirements. Of those, only two were well known and considered viable challengers to the long-serving president. Old-guard opposition figure Noaman Gomaa, often ridiculed as not even popular within his own Wafd Party, ran on the slogan, “We’ll eat something decent,” apparently alluding to promises of economic growth. The other, a relative newcomer to the Egyptian street, Aymen Nour of the nascent Ghad Party, continues to face what likely are trumped-up forgery charges and accusations of being a “U.S. agent.”

The other eight candidates came from virtually unknown opposition parties and presented incoherent platforms—the result either of lack of a real program or crunched campaigning time and resources. One, the fez-topped Ahmed Al Sabahi, head of the Umma Party, declared that, if elected, his priority would be to reinstate Ottoman-era night patrols to prevent terrorism.

Nor did the media help clarify citizens’ choices. According to the Cairo Center for Human Rights, state-owned papers devoted up to two-thirds of their coverage to Mubarak’s campaign, and independent television was nearly as biased. Caught between a long-frustrated desire for change, a first-ever opportunity to vote in a president, and inadequate information on the available alternatives, it is no surprise that in the end many followed the old Egyptian adage, “The known is better than the unknown.”

When one elderly and illiterate villager went to cast her vote and was asked which candidate should be marked on her ballot, she threw her arms up and cried, “By God, is there anyone other than him? The honorable president, of course, our sweetheart!”

Egypt’s First

Of Egypt’s 31.5 million eligible voters, only 7 million (23 percent) actually went to the polls on Sept. 7 to select the country’s first elected president (previously, Egyptians were asked to vote “yes” or “no” in a presidential referendum). According to the official tally, Mubarak won 88.5 percent of those votes (6,316,784, to be exact, or 12 percent of eligible voters), with Aymen Nour coming in second and Noaman Gomaa third. The remaining candidates brought in between 4,000 and 30,000 votes. Eighth-place winner Al Sabahi said he was proud of the 4,393 votes he received from citizens who wanted to “bring back the fez,” but that he personally voted for Mubarak. A reported 177,000 ballots were marked with an X, pulling a vote for no one and symbolically rejecting the election and its candidates.

Analysts blame the low turnout on a widespread sense of political helplessness among Egyptians and suspicion of the election’s integrity, as well as the fact that all candidates came from liberal parties, with no representation among Islamist, progressive, socialist or nationalist currents. Two of the three major opposition parties, the left-leaning Tagummu’ and the Nasserite parties, boycotted the election altogether.

Although by all accounts the presidential election was perhaps the fairest Egypt has yet seen, the judiciary and civil society monitors have reported violations ranging from faulty, missing or unused phosphorous ink meant to mark voters’ hands and inaccurate, outdated voter register lists, to collective oral voting and the distribution of pre-filled ballots in return for empty ones.

Despite these and numerous other grievances, the 2005 elections law passed to regulate the new presidential poll rules out any opportunity to appeal the results or call for a re-vote. Politicians and their supporters have thus switched focus to the parliamentary elections set for November, whose outcome will affect eligibility for nomination in the 2011 presidential election, and in which the now 77-year-old Mubarak is not expected to take part, but rather make way for his son, Gamal.

In the meantime, with the flurry of first-time presidential elections over, Egypt seems to have returned to “normal.” While reading papers filled with full-page congratulatory ads to Mubarak, showing him towering over the pyramids and even the blazing sun, commuters are back to complaining about prices and hours-long traffic delays to clear the way for government motorcades. It won’t be long before the last of Mubarak’s election banners will have fallen to the dusty streets.

Jennifer Peterson is a free-lance journalist based in Cairo.