EGYPT: Opposition Waits for Democracy, Cynically

By Adam Morrow Reprint | | Print |

Adam Morrow

CAIRO, Apr 1 2005 (IPS) - Ever since President Hosni Mubarak asked parliament for a constitutional amendment allowing multi-candidate presidential elections, speculation has grown around prospective contenders.

While a handful of independent personalities have hinted at or announced their candidacies, the banned-but-tolerated Muslim Brotherhood – the country’s most formidable opposition force – has so far refrained from nominating one of their own.

Elsewhere in the region, meanwhile, a number of other regimes have announced tentative steps toward political reform in the face of mounting U.S. pressure to “democratise”.

“A lot of the governments fear what the U.S. is doing now in the wake of the Iraq war,” says Simon Kitchen, a Middle East analyst at the New York based consultancy Eurasia Group. “Still, the momentum for political change has been there for a long time.”

Mubarak surprised many when he requested Feb. 26 that parliament amend the national constitution to allow more than one candidate to run in presidential elections scheduled for September. Previously, voters were given a simple yes-or-no choice in a national referendum on a single nominee endorsed by two-thirds of the People’s Assembly. In the last four elections, that nominee has been Mubarak.

The amendment, however, still awaits the approval of the 454-member parliament.

In the wake of the announcement, a number of political players suggested their intention to run against Mubarak, recently nominated for a fifth term by the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), of which he is chairman. Proposed contenders have included the embattled Al-Ghad party leader Ayman Nour – currently awaiting trial for government accusations of forgery – and sociologist and political activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim.

Most of the main opposition parties, however, have refrained from announcing candidates. “It has never been in the minds of Egyptian politicians to be able to challenge the president,” Mounir Fakhry Abdel Nour, a parliamentarian for the Wafd Party, the largest legally-recognised opposition group was quoted as saying in English-language weekly Cairo magazine.

However, these small, legally recognised parties are relatively toothless, commanding little grassroots support. Most eyes have turned instead to the Muslim Brotherhood, which – despite being officially banned – enjoys enormous popularity, and has remained a potent political force in Egypt since the 1920s. In an indication of its influence, the brotherhood won 15 out of 24 seats in the March 19 board elections at the Lawyers’ Syndicate – a contest considered a microcosm of national politics.

The brotherhood initially reacted to the proposed constitutional amendment tactfully, praising the president for “understanding the popular demand for political reform.” Supreme guide of the group Mehdi Akef went so far as to say that it was the “duty of all Egyptians” to support President Mubarak in the elections, although Akef has since tempered this stance with a list of prerequisite reform measures, including a lifting of the 25-year-old emergency law.

Mohammed Sayyed Said, deputy director of the state-run Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, says the group – conscious of its own power – does not want to do anything to antagonise the government at such a critical juncture. “The brotherhood’s general policy now is not to challenge the president,” Said noted. He added that while the brotherhood would not be allowed to present a nominee on a Muslim Brotherhood ticket, it could technically field candidates “as long they run as independents.”

Despite the niceties, though, the group’s leadership maintains the general view – in common with most of the opposition – that the proposed constitutional change simply will not be enough to allow genuinely free and fair elections. Critics of the proposal point out that, even if parliament approves the amendment, nominees will still have to garner the approval of a certain percentage of MPs – some 80 percent of whom currently represent the ruling NDP.

Deputy to the supreme guide Mohamed Habib told independent daily Al-Misri Al- Youm in mid-March that the “unfeasible stipulations” still governing the electoral process “will deprive the amended article of any significance and make the existence of real competition impossible – for both independent candidates and those affiliated with recognised parties.”

What is more, the timing of the announcement – coming only seven months before elections – leaves little time for would-be competitors to organise campaigns. “No opposition party will really have a chance to compete in the upcoming election, as they’ve been given too short a time to prepare,” Essam El-Erian, a leading member of the group and former parliamentarian told IPS.

In the event that circumstances allow for a multi-candidate contest, however, the Brotherhood hopes to find – through dialogue with other opposition elements – a single nominee acceptable to the widest possible range of national opposition, thus mounting the strongest possible challenge to the NDP’s Mubarak.

“Our first choice would be to put forth a single candidate, who will stand for reform and a fair electoral process, in order to create a consensus,” said El-Erian. “This would be the best for everyone and would best help in moving reform along.”

He added, however, that “there has been no decision until now” on presenting a nominee, emphasising that such a step would depend entirely on ratification of the proposed constitutional revision. “We’re still waiting for the amendment, but we don’t know when it will happen,” he said. “We still don’t know whether we will see a free and fair election, or just another referendum.”

These tentative steps toward political reform suffered a setback at the end of March, however, when two pro-democracy demonstrations in front of the parliament building in downtown Cairo – one of which was organised by the Brotherhood – were interrupted by security forces, resulting in dozens of arrests. The sudden clampdown, coming in the wake of an unusually large number of recent popular protests, suggests that the government will countenance moves towards democracy strictly at its own pace.

First, on March 27, a planned Brotherhood demonstration was broken up by police, while a number of the group’s members were detained. “The Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian government simultaneously gave up the self-restraint that they have shown in recent months and entered into confrontation,” reported the March 28 edition of pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat. The paper went on to state that 49 of the group’s members had been arrested countrywide, presumably in reaction to the planned demonstration. Several reportedly remain in detention.

Again, on March 30, a protest organised by the Egyptian Movement for Change – a loose confederation of pro-democracy NGOs and activist groups – received similar treatment. Pan-Arab daily Asharq Al-Awsat reported the next day that some 30 members of the movement were detained in arrests spanning two provinces.

The heavy-handed police response “reveals the government’s fear of an awakening of the Egyptian people and their demand for freedom and democracy and disproves any claim that there is a real desire to respond to the demands of the people,” George Ishak, one of the movement’s principle coordinators, was quoted as saying.

Nevertheless, despite the sudden government counter-reaction in Egypt, most observers concede that the impetus for political reform in the wider region has been noticeably hastened: from municipal elections in Saudi Arabia last month for the first time in decades; to the conspicuous pro-democracy protests in Beirut following the Feb. 14 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, to Mubarak’s request to tweak the Egyptian constitution. Washington, for its part, has been quick to claim these developments are the result of forward-thinking U.S. policies in the region, most notably the toppling of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. U.S. President George W. Bush, in a March 19 radio address, pointed to Iraq’s “progress toward political freedom” as a model for the Middle East, “inspiring democratic reformers from Beirut to Tehran.” Bush asserted that “today, women can vote in Afghanistan, Palestinians are breaking the old patterns of violence, and hundreds of thousands of Lebanese are rising up to demand their sovereignty and democratic rights.”

According to analyst Kitchen, though, recent political developments cannot be attributed entirely to muscular U.S. efforts aimed at exporting democracy. “It’s a result of both foreign and domestic pressure,” he said. “Political reform is a good way to get the Americans off these regimes’ backs, but it’s also quite useful at home,” where there have always been coordinated calls for political liberalisation. By way of example, he pointed to the pro-democracy demonstrations that took place in Egypt shortly before the U.S.-led war on Iraq, as well as to Lebanon’s “lively political culture, that’s been there for years and years.”

James Zogby, president of the Washington-based Arab-American Institute, writing in the March 31 edition of government-run Al-Ahram Weekly, noted that the Egyptian Movement for Change “is purely homegrown, and has been brewing for years, as have the movements towards expanding citizen participation in several Gulf countries.”

Many Egyptians concede that the pace of political reform in the region has accelerated in the wake of the Iraq war, but are quick to qualify this with a degree of skepticism over Washington’s fuzzy definition of democracy. “They’re talking so much about democracy when there isn’t even democracy in America,” said 33-year-old Cairo resident Mohamed Hasan, pointing to reports of civil and human rights abuses in the U.S. Army’s Guantanamo Bay prison facility as example. “They shouldn’t tell us what to do.”