A coronation flop

EVERYONE pitched in. The government closed schools two weeks early and declared a national holiday. The Morale Department of the Egyptian army dispatched trucks blaring patriotic songs. Church leaders, mosque loudspeakers and television announcers urged, cajoled and in some cases angrily harangued citizens to do their patriotic duty. Yet, despite a controversial last-minute move by election officials to extend voting into an unprecedented third day, the turnout for the first presidential poll since the military coup last July was lower than its organisers had wished.

In any event, the outcome was preordained. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the former defence minister who led the coup that got rid of Egypt’s last elected president, Muhammad Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, will be its next head of state. But Mr Sisi’s supporters had confidently predicted a massive turnout and a crushing endorsement. On the eve of voting the candidate himself said he hoped 40m of Egypt’s 54m voters would cast ballots.

After three days of voting, the main newspapers said the turnout had been 48%, which was oddly higher than early reports, but still unimpressive. Preliminary results suggested that Mr Sisi had won 97% of the valid votes against 3% for his sole rival, Hamdeen Sabahi, an old-school leftist; some poll analysts said that 5% of the ballots had been spoiled. In protest against the extension of voting hours and other alleged irregularities, Mr Sabahi had withdrawn his observers. Democracy International, an American-based monitoring group that fielded one of the few foreign-observer missions, called the extension “just the latest in a series of unusual steps that have seriously harmed the credibility of the process.”

Such doubts have already cast a shadow over Mr Sisi’s presidency. Mr Morsi’s banned Brotherhood was quick to claim the feeble turnout as a response to its call for a boycott. Aside from the group’s supporters, few Egyptians seem to share this view. They ascribe voter apathy to the air of inevitability that the adulatory press whipped up around Mr Sisi, to fatigue with voting after years of polls that have subsequently been rendered meaningless, and to a sense of alienation and disappointment felt keenly by many younger Egyptians, following the heady hopes raised by the country’s revolution in January 2011.

Mr Sisi’s own campaign did not help. Citing security fears, which are understandable considering that Egypt’s police have killed well over 1,000 Brotherhood supporters and have arrested, by one independent count, more than 40,000 people since the coup, the former field-marshal appeared rarely in public. His carefully edited television appearances revealed a man reluctant to tackle pressing issues in public; in one interview he simply flicked his wrist to signal displeasure with a fawning reporter’s question. Mr Sisi lacked any party organisation on the ground. His self-declared campaigners included figures from the previous era of military rule who are widely viewed with distaste.

Egypt’s media machine and hefty state will gloss over the election’s disappointments, falling in step as Mr Sisi moves to form a government, before a general election expected by the autumn. But the Muslim Brothers, whose fortunes had been waning, now feel reinvigorated and vindicated. Mr Sisi’s non-Islamist critics, who have felt increasingly squashed by what many see as a conservative counter-revolution, now feel emboldened to speak out.

The new president’s supporters have also fallen out among themselves. Ministerial hopefuls blame rivals among Mr Sisi’s advisers for his questionable result. Some in the president’s camp have also accused the Nour party, a puritan Salafist group that promised to back Mr Sisi’s campaign, of failing to deliver Islamist votes. As the new president takes up the reins of power in the glare of spotlights rather than from behind the scenes, he may be in for a rough ride.