The
Liquidation of Egypt’s Illiberal Experiment
Mona
El-Ghobashy
December
29, 2010
(Mona
El-Ghobashy is assistant professor of political science at
Barnard College.)
The silver-domed building of Egypt's
national assembly. (Mona El-Ghobashy) |
The Egyptian
parliamentary elections that ended on December 5 defied expectations,
not because the ruling National Democratic Party again dominates
Parliament but because of the lengths to which it proved willing
to go to engineer its monopoly. Official and unofficial ruling-party
candidates garnered 93.3 percent of the seats in the national
assembly, while marginal opposition parties received 3 percent
and the Muslim Brothers got a lone seat to be occupied by a member
who would not abide by the Brothers’ boycott of the runoff. While
these results are identical to the outcome of the 1995 elections,
the reaction this time has been much more severe.
Egyptian and
international observers with no known sympathies for the opposition
have condemned the conduct and outcome of the polls. Moderate
political analyst ‘Amr al-Shubaki of the establishment al-Ahram
Center for Political and Strategic Studies called it “the worst
election in Egypt’s history.”[1] US spokesmen expressed “dismay” and “disappointment” at irregularities,
in a collective throwing up of hands that reportedly goes to
the very top of the State Department. Prominent National Democratic
Party (NDP) member Hamdi al-Sayyid, who was ousted from the seat
he had held since 1979, fumed, “The fraud perpetrated against
me was systematic. They deserve a Ph.D. in rigging.”[2]
The outcome
of the elections unsettled a widely held belief about the Egyptian
regime: It tolerates a smidgen of parliamentary opposition to
disarm domestic and international critics. Indeed, the longevity
of President Husni Mubarak’s rule is often attributed to omniscient
political manipulation that makes clever use of opposition, even
creating it at times, but never permitting it to threaten the
powers that be. The regime employed the results of the 2005 elections,
when the opposition secured an unprecedented 25 percent of parliamentary
seats, to signal that continued pressure upon Egypt to democratize
would only bring fearsome Islamists to power. If British colonial
officials wary of bumptious nationalists ended Egypt’s “liberal
experiment” in 1936, one might say that the Mubarak cabal has
halted the illiberal experiment, a second, less substantive venture
into partial parliamentary politics. The 2010 contest’s liquidation
of all credible parliamentary opposition, both secular and religious,
raises two main questions: Why did the government abandon its
previous modus operandi? And where does the shift leave the opposition,
fragmented and hobbled in the best of circumstances, and now
robbed of its tenuous parliamentary toehold?
A common answer
to the first question is that Mubarak and his inner circle are
consolidating their forces in anticipation of a choreographed
transfer of presidential power, most likely to the aging president’s
son Gamal. But the NDP’s total lock on Parliament has less to
do with securing the impending presidential transition and more
to do with cordoning off the legislature from bottom-up demands
for representation. It would not be the first time an Egyptian
regime has tried this gambit since multi-party legislative elections
were restored in 1976. In 1979, the year of the Camp David peace
deal with Israel, Anwar al-Sadat increased repression to return
an assembly cleansed of credible critics; in 1995, Mubarak did
the same thing. The experiences of the outgoing parliament’s
session have made Egypt’s ruling cartel wary of normalizing a
legislative opposition at a time of economic restructuring and
widespread ferment in society. Rather than expand representative
channels to absorb collective grievances, the regime is opting
to close off all the outlets.
“Rigging
with a Hint of Elections”
Elections
are fraught moments for narrow ruling coalitions, particularly
if they occur amidst heightened social demands for representation
and redistribution of wealth. By definition, authoritarian cartels
cannot win elections fair and square, so they carefully game
the rules and use state violence to return legislatures mirroring
their own interests rather than a fair sampling of interest groups
in society. The 2010 elections were especially challenging for
the Egyptian regime. The polls came at a time of aggressive economic
transformation, with disadvantaged social sectors and their aspiring
representatives seeking greater inclusion in state institutions.
And they unfolded in an atmosphere of intense public anger about
corruption scandals involving figures at the peak of the regime.
To forestall the recruitment into Parliament of outsiders and
wild cards riding the wave of discontent, the ruling clique resorted
to its reliable tool kit of electoral skullduggery. Muhammad
Badi‘, leader of the Muslim Brothers, quipped, “These were not
elections with rigging; it was rather rigging with a hint of
elections.”[3]
Opposition
deputies protest outside Parliament. The sign reads: "A
judge for every ballot box." (Mona
El-Ghobashy) |
Manipulating
the rules was the name of the game. Election management was wrested
from judges and returned to civil servants, under the aegis of
a Higher Election Commission with no real authority beyond the
task of announcing election returns. Judicial supervision of
the 2000 and 2005 elections had reined in the notoriously inflated
turnout figures and vote counts of Egyptian elections past.[4] Judicial oversight of both voting
and ballot counting increased the credibility of the elections,
energized opposition participation and led to incrementally more
representative legislatures. The rollback of full judicial supervision
was thus a key plank in the regime’s preparation for the 2010
polls. A Wikileaks cable summarizing a 2005 meeting between Gamal
Mubarak and Elizabeth Cheney, then a State Department official
with responsibility for Middle East democracy promotion, says
that Mubarak “blamed the low turnout in the presidential election
(about 7 million voters or 23 percent) on overzealous judges
supervising the September 7 ballot who had, allegedly, refused
to allow more than one voter at a time into polling stations,
and thereby diminished turnout.”
The meaning
of ending judicial supervision was made immediately clear on
election day. If the iconic image from the 2005 elections showed
elderly female voters climbing makeshift ladders to enter polling
stations blocked off by police but staffed by judges, the defining
image from 2010 was a surreptitiously shot four-minute video
of a voter-free polling station in the Bilbays district of the
Delta province of Sharqiyya. Two poll workers calmly filled out
ballot after ballot, stacks of which were then carried off by
other civil servants to be stuffed in boxes off camera.[5]
By the early
afternoon of November 28, the day of first-round voting, and
in defiance of the Higher Election Commission’s strict ban on
cameras inside polling stations, hundreds of election videos
were being posted on YouTube and Facebook capturing the fraud-producing
methods of yore. The clips are a valuable documentary record;
it turns out that the ballot stuffing of Bilbays was ubiquitous.
They also picture clusters of NDP voters huddled over ballot
boxes collectively filling out ballots while uniformed police
look on; opposition candidates and their representatives heatedly
arguing with polling station heads who refused them entry, citing
eleventh-hour rule changes; opposition voters assembled in front
of closed-off polling and counting stations, chanting slogans
against the cheating; and incensed citizens storming polling
stations and hurling stuffed ballot boxes out the windows. The
footage includes images of NDP candidates and their constituents
burning down an NDP headquarters in Asyout, brandishing tear
gas canisters for the cameras, and blockading roads in Minya
and Minoufiyya provinces to protest rigging in favor of intra-party
opponents.
Visual evidence
of fraud was corroborated by testimonials from high-profile NDP
figures. With barely concealed outrage, both Mustafa al-Sa‘id
and Hamdi al-Sayyid, NDP parliamentary committee chairmen whose
seats were taken, charged that civil servants who supervised
polling in their districts were bought off by their NDP rivals.
Former Justice Minister Mahmoud Abu al-Layl, head of the Higher
Elections Commission in 2005, chimed in, dismissing the commission
as ornamental and calling for a return to full judicial supervision
and the principle of “a judge for every ballot box.”[6] And the ruling party’s Nash’at al-Qassas, a North Sinai deputy
best known for his venomous attacks on the opposition in the
2005 parliament, irately told the press after his loss, “The
elections are a huge travesty! Judges were replaced with poor
government clerks who were bought off at all the polling stations,
and I will testify to that!”[7]
The most widely
discussed incident involved Judge Walid al-Shafi‘i, who went
to the press with his election-day experience. Al-Shafi‘i was
assigned to the Badrashin district in the October 6 province
outside Cairo as one of the drastically reduced corps of jurists
overseeing the polls. On the afternoon of the voting, he made
his way to an auxiliary polling station to investigate reports
that it was blocked off to voters. As soon as he arrived at the
station, he was detained and his ID card confiscated by Ahmad
Mabrouk, head of the Badrashin State Security Investigations
Department, who barked at him, “You step aside.” While in police
custody, al-Shafi‘i saw no voters at the station but did see
poll workers sitting at desks in a classroom filling out empty
ballots. A hapless worker came up to him with a pile of completed
cards, saying, “I’m finished, sir.”[8]
Under the
Rotunda
Why has the
Mubarak regime abandoned what is thought to be its trademark
asset, namely the calibration of election rigging to let in some
legislative opposition, polish its image and thereby stabilize
its hold on power? The oft-made claim that the regime needs total
control of Parliament to stage-manage the 2011 presidential election
is unconvincing. Even with a quarter of the seats, a parliamentary
opposition cannot field a contender for executive office. The
rules laid out in the amended Article 76 in Egypt’s constitution
are expressly designed to block the presidential candidacy of
anyone outside the regime.
Article 76
lays out two paths to presidential candidacy. The first path
runs through membership in a party, provided that the party has
been in existence for at least five consecutive years before
the date of candidacy and has at least 3 percent representation
in both the lower and upper houses of Parliament. In addition,
the presidential candidate must have been a member of the party’s
high council for at least one consecutive year. A built-in exception
exempts an existing party from the threshold, allowing it to
field a candidate even if it has only one parliamentary seat.
Four regime-created opposition parties received one seat each
in the 2010 elections. (The Muslim Brothers who held 88 seats
in the outgoing assembly were compelled to campaign as independents,
and not members of a party, since the Society of Muslim Brothers
is outlawed by the regime.) The second path to the presidential
palace is for “independents,” who must obtain the signatures
of at least 250 elected officials distributed as follows: 65
from the lower house and 25 from the upper house of Parliament,
and ten members of every municipal council in at least 14 governorates.
The upper house and municipal councils are entirely dominated
by the NDP.
Both NDP members
and their critics attribute the 2010 election outcome to the
party’s new guard, headed by assistant secretary-general Gamal
Mubarak and his right-hand man, organization secretary Ahmad
‘Izz. Regime apologists deploy the rhetoric of superior organization
and dogged constituency service to portray the government party’s
dominance as a “sweeping win.” NDP court intellectual Abdel Moneim
Said insists: “The NDP had begun to prepare for this campaign
five years ago, applying a minutely calibrated scientific approach
that involved thorough studies of all the electoral constituencies.”[9] Opposition writers agree that the election was
the handiwork of the NDP’s junior elite but give them a negative
cast, depicting Gamal Mubarak and ‘Izz as political neophytes
with a zero-sum view of politics.[10] Writing at the BBC website, the novelist Alaa al-Aswany drew
a nostalgic contrast with the grizzled old guard represented
by Kamal al-Shazli, the consummate horse trader whose death shortly
before the elections symbolized the complete takeover of the
NDP by the crony capitalists surrounding the younger Mubarak.
Another view holds that the new guard’s ham-handed methods failed
to produce the more favorable outcome bandied about before the
elections, in which the regime was expected to recraft its parliamentary
opposition by deftly replacing the Brothers with the reconstituted
Wafd party.
A focus on
the crew of NDP forty-somethings now steering the ship of Egyptian
state should not obscure the deeper social dynamics driving their
calculations. As the new guard commandeers public assets for
delivery into private hands, Parliament moves to center stage
as the site where the legal framework for the transfer is hammered
out. As with any exclusive club, being a member of Parliament
allows entry into new networks of privilege created by the economic
shift, but it also enables access to information about economic
rearrangements that is routinely hidden from public view. NDP
hangers-on seek Parliament for the profits, while the opposition
seeks Parliament for knowledge and proximity to the bureaucracy
controlling public services. Because of its visible size, at
121 deputies, and its representation of normally excluded interests,
the combined opposition in the 2005 parliament was able to clamor
for the information and services that the NDP wanted to reserve
for itself. So as to forestall a reprise, the regime decided
to shutter Parliament as a place to do politics, reallocating
the opposition’s valuable seats to a wider net of NDP dependents.
Muslim
Brother and MP Ashraf Badr al-Din outside Parliament.
His sash reads: "No to the constitutional coup." The
white sign reads, "No to the police state," and
the yellow sign is a death notice for the Egyptian constitution. (Mona
El-Ghobashy) |
Egypt’s opposition
parliamentarians had no illusions about their clout under the
rotunda. The NDP’s overwhelming majority drowned out even their
loud voices in debates over legislation and parliamentary rules
prevented them from blocking government policies. So they ramped
up their problem-solving and monitoring functions instead, channeling
goods and services from the bureaucracy to their constituents,
and activating mothballed legislative oversight instruments to
funnel information to the public about controversial bills and
policies. One of the most intense confrontations between government
and opposition inside the chamber concerned the state budget
for FY 2008-2009. In the March 30, 2010 plenary session to vote
on the budget, 98 Brotherhood and secular opposition deputies
tabled a written protest accusing the government of manipulating
revenue figures. Budget Committee chairman Ahmad ‘Izz angrily
pounded on the podium and shook his fist at fellow committee
member and Muslim Brother MP Ashraf Badr al-Din, “I know more
than you do! This is just an attempt by the ignorant to instill
public doubt in the state budget!”[11] Not surprisingly, in an extended rationalization
of the NDP’s “victory” after the elections, ‘Izz targeted the
Brothers’ parliamentary performance. “The overall attitude of
MB representatives over the past five years was to reject every
single draft of legislation and every article -- and every paragraph
in every article -- of draft law, for no logical reason,” he
wrote in the quasi-official al-Ahram newspaper. “Our MPs
debated, amended and passed legislation allowing the private
sector to participate in infrastructure projects so our country
can reduce budget spending, but none of them agreed.”
When their
views were mooted inside the chamber, opposition deputies simply
took them to the sidewalk outside. Bearing signs and wearing
sashes emblazoned with slogans over their suits, the protesting
opposition parliamentarians were a novel sight for eager news
photographers. The deputies staged walkouts on a host of domestic
and foreign policy matters, including the Israeli bombing of
Lebanon in 2006, the wholesale constitutional amendments of 2007,
President George W. Bush’s visit to Egypt and the exclusion of
opposition candidates from municipal elections in 2008, the renewals
of emergency law in 2006 and 2008, and the undemocratic amendments
to the law on the exercise of political rights in 2010. They
joined forces with the extra-parliamentary opposition, participating
in the May Day protest demanding an increase in the national
minimum wage and sitting cross-legged on the ground with the
protesters who camped outside Parliament during the spring of
2010, listening to their grievances and attempting to broker
negotiations with government officials. The parliamentary opposition
represented a much wider social base than the regime is prepared
to deal with in an official institution.
The newly
seated parliament faces a docket of crucial, controversial bills
regulating work and life conditions for large swathes of the
citizenry. These draft laws include an “anti-terrorism” bill
to replace emergency law; amendments to the 1978 law regulating
government employment; a reconsideration of the real estate tax
bill shelved in 2008 because of parliamentary opposition; bills
introducing the privatization of public utilities such as water
and health insurance under the rubric of “public-private partnerships”;
a new law to regulate work conditions in the nursing profession;
a new law governing the allocation of state-owned land in the
wake of corruption scandals involving regime cronies; amendments
to the 1993 law on internal elections in professional associations;
and two bills long awaited by Coptic citizens, regulating the
building of churches and the burning issue of divorce and remarriage.
With the safe removal of opposition deputies, who ‘Izz frankly
admitted were a “stumbling block,” the univocal parliament can
legislate a new social order in peace, insulated from demands
for redistribution and accountability by affected constituencies.
“A Parallel
Country”
Credible oppositions
in countries gripped by authoritarian regimes are no strangers
to political banishment. They operate on the understanding that
inclusion in national power structures is never irreversible.
Dislodged from their perch in Parliament, the Egyptian ex-legislators
will return to the grassroots that catapulted them there in the
first place: the professional associations, social movements,
unlicensed political parties and home districts. The new element
in 2010 is an attempt by the booted parliamentarians to maintain
the new ties they developed under the rotunda, in the guise of
a popular, “parallel” parliament. The day that the “rigged parliament”
was seated on December 13, a crowd of ex-MPs from the opposition
stood on the steps of the administrative courts complex in Giza
and recited the oath of office, cheering the role of the administrative
courts in issuing hundreds of rulings invalidating election procedures
and vowing to carry on the representative and monitoring work
they did from 2005 to 2010. Political scientist and ex-MP for
Shubra al-Khayma Gamal Zahran said that the parallel parliament
is a natural extension of the opposition walkouts during the
2005 term.[12]
Despite the
vast asymmetry of power between the ruling clique and the perpetually
weak and divided opposition, the emergent idea of a parallel
parliament has been met with swift and withering criticism across
the board. In scripted remarks made to look spontaneous during
his inaugural address to the new parliament, Husni Mubarak japed,
“Let them pass the time.” Parliamentary speaker Fathi Sorour,
assuming his post for the twentieth consecutive year, told Egyptian
state television that the parallel parliament subjects its members
to Article 86 of the Penal Code, which criminalizes associations
that harm social peace. And political scientist Samer Soliman
pronounced the initiative dead on arrival. “It is a joke more
than anything else. It is more of a media than a political phenomenon….
Are they engaged in mobilizing people or do they just talk to
the press?”[13]
Ridicule and
veiled threats aside, the parallel parliament initiative brings
popular politics full circle. For some time now in Egypt, real
politics is to be found in alternative spaces improvised by citizens
shut out from formal institutions. Doctors, lawyers, pharmacists
and engineers have turned their professional associations into
mini-parliaments, complete with competitive elections. University
students barred by the authorities from contesting student union
elections have organized free and fair parallel polls, supervised
by sympathetic professors. And property tax collectors have succeeded
in establishing an independent union when the official union
failed to defend their interests. In a widely circulated letter,
a reader wrote in to a newspaper half-mockingly calling for generalizing
the phenomenon: “We need more than a parallel parliament, student
union and trade union. We need a parallel country with a parallel
democracy guaranteeing freedom and rotation of power and a parallel
constitution.”[14]
Two features
distinguish the former parliamentarians from the cross-ideological
alliances of counter-elites in the 1990s. First is the shared
experience of equal-opportunity election rigging, which secular
opposition members acknowledge that they did not anticipate.
The Wafd’s divested Mustafa al-Gindi put it bluntly at a December
11 press conference: “Everybody first thought that it was the
Muslim Brothers who were going to be targeted, but it became
clear that the government is targeting everyone who doesn’t say
yes.” A testament to the regime’s effective divide-and-rule tactics,
this realization will not be enough to counter the daunting collective
action problems facing the opposition. A second new feature is
the parallel parliament’s attempt to rally under a single banner
the radical-leaning new social movements such as Kifaya and the
April 6 youth movement, the moderate, establishment-oriented
Wafd and Democratic Front parties, and umbrella formations in
their own right such as Mohamed ElBaradei’s National Association
for Change. The Wafd has gingerly accepted participation in the
parallel assembly and offered its building as a provisional headquarters,
while the Muslim Brothers are divided between a skeptical Guidance
Bureau that shies away from any formation lacking legal standing
and ex-MPs like Muhsin Radi, Muhammad al-Baltagi and Ahmad Diyab,
who are founding members of the shadow body.
The popular
parliament faces the familiar roster of existential dilemmas
bedeviling opposition groups in Egypt for decades. How will they
maintain viability in the face of government repression and internal
centrifugal pressures? How will they treat the imbalance between
the heft of the Muslim Brothers and the small scale of secular
groups? And will they take to the streets now that official channels
are sealed off, as the Muslim Brothers’ leader hints?[15] The ex-MPs have taken heart from the regime’s
hostile response, interpreting it as proof of their disproportionate
influence on a powerful, but defensive-minded ruling cartel.
The measure of their effectiveness will not be whether they mobilize
the people, a tall order for an embattled opposition facing state
coercion at every turn. It will lie in the cogency of their claim
to inform and represent a broad, restive, disenfranchised majority.
Endnotes
[1] ‘Amr
al-Shubaki, “Why Are These the Worst Elections?” al-Misri
al-Yawm, December 2, 2010. [Arabic]
[2] Al-Misri
al-Yawm, December 15, 2010.
[3] Reuters,
December 23, 2010.
[4] A
reversion to inflated figures can be seen in district-level returns
from the first and second rounds, posted online at: http://www.elections.gov.eg/index.html
[5] The
clip is available online at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4HBUKkXyIc.
It has had more than 210,000 views.
[6] Al-Dustour,
December 8, 2010.
[7] Al-Misri
al-Yawm, December 3, 2010.
[8] Al-Misri
al-Yawm, November 30, 2010.
[9] Abdel
Moneim Said, “Last Word on the Elections,” al-Ahram Weekly,
December 16-22, 2010.
[10] ‘Imad
al-Din Husayn, “A Palace Coup in the NDP,” al-Shurouq,
December 8, 2010, and Dia’ Rashwan, “Who Gave the Order and Why?” al-Shurouq,
December 27, 2010. [Arabic]
[11] Al-Misri
al-Yawm, March 31, 2010.
[12] Al-Shurouq,
December 20, 2010.
[13] Al-Misri
al-Yawm (English), December 21, 2010.
[14] Ahmad
‘Abd al-Ghani, “A Parallel Country,” al-Misri al-Yawm,
December 20, 2010. [Arabic]
[15] Reuters,
December 23, 2010.
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