“Just like Nazis can’t run in Germany and Chechen rebels can’t run in Russia – people who do not accept the ground rules are not in the game.”
CAIRO -Critics of Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi say his “roadmap to democracy” is flawed because the forty-six day election period puzzled voters by combining more than 300 non-partisan provincial contests with party-based campaigning in another 120 regional districts and claim the process was skewed further as the final 28 legislators were selected by the president himself.
“The result is a parliament that does not seem to fully represent the views of all Egyptians,” Eric Bjornlund, head of the U.S. election observation group Democracy International told The Media Line.
“Turnout was especially low among younger Egyptians and our observers rarely saw voters under the age of 35,” said Bjornlund.
Veteran observers of Egypt’s politics counter that their new 596 -member House of Representatives reflects the country’s diversity and is already proving to be a lively forum for debate in its first week in session.
They point to the more than ninety seats won by women, the highest in the history of the Egyptian parliament at nearly fifteen percent, and gains in representation for the Coptic Christian minority.
“Anyone can play in Egyptian politics as long as they agree to the president’s roadmap and that even included the Nour party who are Salafists,” said Zeyad Elkelani, a Cairo University Political Science professor.
“Just like Nazis can’t run in Germany and Chechen rebels can’t run in Russia – people who do not accept the ground rules are not in the game.”
The Sisi administration’s decision to label the Muslim Brotherhood‘s Freedom and Justice party a terror group paved the way for emergence of two new parties – the Free Egyptians -who advocate economic decentralization and deregulation and the statist Nation’s Future Party, more enamored with government- commissioned mega-projects and protective of publically owned enterprises.
Elkelani expects that over time the legislature as a whole will self-identify with either the liberal or statist approach to economic issues.
The Free Egyptians with sixty-five seats in the parliament were clear beneficiaries of financial support from Naguib Sawiris, a Coptic Christian business tycoon who has criticized official interference in the news media and the jailing of youth activists by the security services.
More than any other parliamentary grouping, the Free Egyptians are likely to back moves to repeal or change some of the wide-reaching powers the Sisi administration has exercised over the past two years, including laws limiting public protests and increased military jurisdiction in civilian matters.
“Those kinds of policies make the regime lose friends. President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is popular enough and there is no need for such measures to secure his rule,” said Sawiris.
Attempts to herd the different parties into one large “Coalition to Support the Egyptian State” floundered this week after Mohamed Badran, the 24 year old leader of the Nation’s Future party said he was pulling out of an effort to create a super majority to ratify all legislation passed by Sisi and his cabinet during the two year suspension of the legislature.
“The president has already announced that he would not have a political party”, said Badran, “and this coalition was being organized to give out favors.”
Sayyid al-Badawi, the chairman of the parliament’s third largest grouping – the New Wafd Party – took a swipe at his rivals in the Nation’s Future and Free Egyptians who attracted millions of Egyptian pounds in corporate campaign cash.
“The phenomenon of businessmen funding political parties is new and strange, and it poses a major threat to Egypt and its political life. Political competition between parties has turned into financial competition,” Badawi said.
While the Wafd has deep nationalist credentials as the party most identified with the struggle for Egypt’s independence from Britain, Badawi himself owns the Al-Hayat commercial television station and was close to associates of former president Hosni Mubarak.
Mubarak’s now defunct New Democratic Party was known as a dispenser of government patronage especially in the energy and real estate sectors.
After several days of tumultuous speechifying and mutual recrimination by parliament members, speaker Ali Abdel-Al ordered a temporary a halt to live broadcasts of sessions.
Observers say matters are likely to get testier in the coming months as committee chairmanships and other forms of patronage are divvied up by legislators.
The parliament has just fifteen days to review the decrees and laws issued by the state since the overthrow of Mohammed Morsi and observers are looking for signs in President Sisi’s first speech to assembly this week that there may be some leeway in that timetable for the new lawmakers to consider the measures.
“It is not in Sisi’s interest to go on in the fashion of a dictatorship, and what happened in the past cannot happen today,” said Sherif Aref, editorial secretary of the liberal daily Al-Masry Al-Youm.
“Egypt is going after massive economic projects and the president needs the reinforcement that an empowered legislature can provide to attract foreign investment,” Aref told The Media Line.
Public opinion polls suggest Egyptians are taking an interest in their new House of Representatives and expect it to tackle the country’s economic problems, chief among which are a chronic shortfall of foreign currency earnings, a high budget deficit, and a rapidly expanding working age population chasing a limited number of new jobs.
“When you ask people what they want to see, they say they a more prosperous country and a higher quality of life,” said Magued Osman, Director of “Baseera”, the Egyptian Center for Public Opinion Research.
Osman told The Media Line that Egyptians are particularly keen to see what action their representatives are going to take to address unemployment which, while not as dire as in Iraq and Spain, has officially hovered around 12.8% ever since the 2011 revolution.
“Our survey was open-ended and employment was ranked by nearly a quarter of respondents as the issue which parliament must deal with first,” said Osman.
“Of course terrorism is affecting the economy – especially tourism, but that’s not the first thing that comes to mind because people are prioritizing the needs of their families- and for the average Egyptian that means jobs and prices,” explained the country’s top pollster.