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Editorial
Mubarak's day of reckoning

From MEI in London

September 15th, 2005 -- Some people voted more than once. Some complained of harassment and intimidation. Others were unable to vote at all. There was little in the way of monitoring. The incumbent won with a gigantic share of the popular vote, by a margin which would be utterly inconceivable in an election in a developed country.

Egypt’s 32 million registered voters went to the polls on 7 September, or rather just under a quarter of them did, to choose who should be the president. And despite 6,000 years of suffering the whims and fancies of autocratic rulers in whose elevation to high office they had never before had a direct say, they chose the same man who had been their autocratic ruler for the previous 24 years.

A great deal has been said and written, including on these pages, about the election itself and the events surrounding it. Words like “circus”, “rigged”, “void”, “stolen”, “shoved down our throats” and “never mind” compete with “new era”, historic departure” and the verdict of prominent civil society activist Saad al-Din Ibrahim that “the real winner is civil society”.

If Ibrahim is right, then the occasion will be seen in years to come as the turning-point in the country’s — indeed perhaps the whole region’s — long and twisted march towards transparent and accountable governance. But some inkling as to the direction Egypt is moving in may be forthcoming rather sooner, with parliamentary elections a matter of weeks away.

These have a rather longer tradition of popular participation and, of course, of irregularities and downright obfuscation on the part of the state and President Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, which always wins by what would be described in a Western political context as a “landslide” of massive proportions. And it will surely do so this time, as well. It is rather the conduct of these elections which will be the main point of scrutiny — will they be independently monitored, will judges supervise at the polling stations, will the NDP and security forces refrain from harassing and intimidating voters, will vote-rigging be prevented? It would surprise no one — least of all the Egyptian public — if the answer to all these questions turns out to be “no”.

Not on the cards at all of course is the prospect that the largest opposition group — the Muslim Brotherhood — will be allowed to organize as a political party and contest the elections. Nor, therefore, is it likely that Egyptians will turn out to vote in the parliamentary elections in significantly greater numbers than they did on 7 September.

For all the novel excitement of the campaign, for all the coverage — often surprisingly forthright and open — in the local media, for all the genuine and largely successful effort undertaken by the ruling party to present President Mubarak to the public as a sympathetic figure, turn-out on 7 September was a woeful 23%. Which means 7,360,000 out of 32 million registered voters, out of a total population of some 75 million, felt moved to participate in the election of the head of state. While the political apathy of the Egyptian public is the stuff of legend, and while a number of people genuinely attempted to vote but found their names were not on the voter lists, the extent of non-participation ought to give any regime cause for serious concern.

But this was no ordinary election. For one thing, nobody believed Mubarak could lose. For another, everybody knew that the regime did not want to have an election in the first place and only did so under pressure from Washington to “democratize”.

One might expect that Husni Mubarak would be just the kind of autocratic ruler the US Administration would like to see the back of in the course of its campaign to infuse the Middle East with the fresh breeze of democracy. But of course Mubarak is just the kind of autocratic ruler — a reliably loyal ally in a country of geostrategic importance — the US Administration needs to keep in place and on side. This explains Washington’s warm congratulation of Mubarak followed by the suggestion that it was keeping a close eye on the forthcoming parliamentary polls.

But given the hostility to it of Egypt’s largest non-governmental organization, it is very much to be doubted that the US will stick its neck out very far in support of the cause of Egyptian civil society.


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