Living with democracy in Egypt

Humanist, Nov-Dec, 2005 by Daniel Consolatore

HOSNI MUBAREK WAS ALMOST elected president of Egypt in September 2005. Not that the seventy-seven-year-old secular autocrat who has ruled that nation for the past twenty-four years lost the election; by the official count, he took nearly 85 percent of the vote. His nearest competitor, Ayman Nour, the upstart head of the fledgling opposition party al-Ghad ("Tomorrow"), managed less than 8 percent. The only other candidate to take any significant tally was the aged No-man Gamaa of the venerable al-Wafd ("Delegation") party, who managed less than 3 percent. The Ikhwan al-Muslimeen ("Muslim Brotherhood"), feared by so many Westerners for its purist Islamic social and political agenda, didn't even field a candidate.

Mubarek's decisive victory would seem to be reassuring to most people--particularly secular Americans--worried for the future of the few Western-friendly, moderate Arab regimes, threatened as they are by the Islamicization of politics in the region. The Bush administration would also seem to have reason to be pleased, given its recent change of heart about Arab democracy. The missing chemical weapons in Iraq and subsequent justification of the war there as precedent for democratization have inspired the White House to push for as many elections as possible in the region. In fact, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke at the American University in Cairo in June, she announced to some surprise that "for sixty years" the United States had been mistaken in "pursu[ing] stability at the expense of democracy" in the Middle East. For generations, U.S. pundits were sure that the "Arab street" couldn't be trusted with the vote, as they might hand over power to communists or fundamentalist Islamists. Realpolitik dictated that autocrats and dictators, like Mubarek and Saddam Hussein, had to be coddled in order to maintain "stability" in the region. If they would then stage elections or dispense with them altogether, deny free speech, and let loose secret police to terrorize the population, the White House would likely turn a blind eye. But if Mubarek could now claim a true democratic mandate, that would be the best of all worlds.

The problem is that Mubarek was only "almost" elected because the balloting didn't quite amount to a legitimate contest, even if it was the first ever in which Egyptian voters had a choice of candidates for president. Unwilling to come down on a "moderate," secular Arab ally, as it did on Iran in June, the Bush administration declared the Egyptian vote "an important step toward holding fully free and fair competitive multiparty elections" But the actual process was so ridden with irregularities, manipulations, and outright fraud that it more resembled, as one influential blogger (known simply by the Arab woman's name Baheyya) put it, a presidential selection spectacle. Even to register, the candidates had to clear an array of hurdles only an authoritarian bureaucracy could dream up. For example, challengers had to obtain approval of sixty-five members of parliament, which, thanks to rigged elections, is conveniently controlled by a two-thirds majority of Mubarek's National Democratic Party (NDP).

The national media, though conceded some independence in practice, is also entirely state-owned, and so it wasn't much of problem for the regime to filter what Egyptians were hearing and reading. One native human rights group determined that the major daily newspapers had been "conscripted for daily propaganda." The state used its regulatory authority to harass opposition parties, prohibiting the airing of an al-Ghad television ad alleging that the party had plagiarized the music. Ayman Nour was imprisoned earlier in the year on trumped up charges. What's more, the campaign itself was an absurdly short three weeks, and the well-funded NDP was able to plaster the cities with banners, posters, and billboard-sized cutouts of Mubarek. Perhaps most importantly though, decades of staged elections meant that party politics in the country were moribund and the "electorate" had little understanding of its rights or courage to defy the regime.

Mubarek also defied requests, including one from George W. Bush, to allow outside monitoring of the election. By election day, September 7, 2005, the judges' syndicate agreed to accept a very limited and inadequate monitoring proposal, and the state-appointed Presidential Election Commission waited until voting had begun to announce that independent Egyptian groups would be permitted. Those groups then reported harassment, including beatings by security services and police, as did opposition party activists and even some voters. In the end, the Egyptian Human Rights Organization calculated that some 15 percent of the votes were rigged, and Nour claimed that he had been cheated of three of every four votes cast for him. Little after all had changed, it seemed, and true democracy on the Nile is obviously still a long way off. In truth, however, flawed as it was, the election may be the continuation of a wave of political change sweeping over Egypt.