It’s Official: Egypt Will Hold Parliamentary Elections in September
The military junta ruling Egypt has announced that parliamentary elections will be held in September. Rather than spending the next five months complaining, those who aren’t supporting the Muslim Brotherhood better get started actually working and organizing.
I’ll analyze this a lot more in the coming months but briefly the blocs are as follows:
Islamists: The Muslim Brotherhood says it is aiming at getting 30 percent of the seats. I think they’ll succeed. A smaller, moderate Islamist party — whose members split from the Brotherhood because they say it is too extremist — would be lucky to get any seats.
Left: There are several neo-Marxist parties, but it is not clear whether they will work together or run separately. In either case, they are unlikely to get many seats, and none at all if they compete for the limited votes that might be obtained. Probably no more than 5 percent.
Conservatives: The ex-regime’s politicians, including leaders of the ruling National Democratic Party. This group could do better than outsiders expect. If they unite and put forward coherent positions, they could take as much as 20 percent.
Nationalists: If Amr Moussa organizes his own radical nationalist party and does a good job, it might get up to 40 percent, especially if he brings in a lot of the former supporters of the Mubarak regime. This is the only group I think that could have a larger bloc than the Islamists.
So, according to your analysis,the Centrist pro-democracy forces would be lucky, lucky mind you, to get a small minority of the seats in parliament. Everything else would be either the Muslim Brotherhood or the far left (communists) or the Conservatives and Nationalists, which would basically be putting in another Mubarak. Swell, some choices. What’s worse, I think everybody is underestimating the power of Islamic fundamentalism in that country. Just like in Iran when the Shah was removed, the country thought that the only “honest” form of government would be one that had the clerics in charge. Then, after 30 years of killing and repression, the Iranian people are finally coming around to the idea that putting the mullahs in charge was a mistake. I think Egypt is going down this same road and that the nationalists will simply cut a deal with the Muslim Brotherhood to share power, temporarily. Then, once the Muslim Brotherhood has the power, they will eliminate the nationalists, as all dictatorships do. This will not end well for anybody.
I believe the socialist/leftists may have the third largest bloc, possibly within reach of the nationalists. Egypt has about 20% of it’s population that belongs to trade unions and “syndicates”. Some of these are associated with the MB, such as the Arab Doctors Union and one of the largest lawyer unions is chock full of MB members.
However, on going strikes by various working sectors seems to point to a wider and stronger base for the socialist worker’s parties (not that that should be a surprise since socialism is the base of Egypt’s political system). The April 6 movement, one of the “revolutionary youth” groups, came to exist out of the mill worker strikes in 2008.
A large number of these groups have already formed a party called the Popular Alliance. It’s aims are to attract both the socialist union workers and the left leaning “intelligentsia” (their own words). While they do not have the political acumen of the MB, they are fairly well connected and organized. It was these groups that basically did the ground work for drawing and organizing people out of the slums with shouts about food prices and low wages. If you watched the documentary by PBS on the revolution, you will see that they did much of the tracking of events, organizing people and sending them through different areas to either confront or avoid the authorities. Lot’s of organization via computer and they were the ones that actually took lessons from European and American organizations (socialist workers, democracy now, etc) on how to organize protests, maintaining the idea of “peaceful” protests, etc.
There are rumors abounding that the MB will throw it’s weight behind el Baradei as president (waiting for the official announcement). While that will not surprise anyone in the west who already considered el Baradei as the MB’s front man in the revolution, the rumor did shock the liberals (freedom/democracy crowd + leftist supporters). Especially when el Baradei did not immediately come out and make a response welcoming the MB’s support to “create a civil state”. They are wondering if the MB is trying to crash El Baradei’s chances to be elected.
“The civil state” is now the catch phrase that is used among the liberals AND the MB to suggest that the state will not be organized on a religious basis. Even though many civil laws are already based on Islamic sharia (such as divorce, child custody, etc). It is a dichotomy that the new practitioners of democracy are going to find difficult to balance.
The truth is, El Baradei is the MB choice because a) they aren’t going to run their own candidate, because b) whoever sets atop the mess that is going to ensue for the creation of the constitution will probably have a bad name at the end, no matter how much of an “honest broker” they try to be; c) at the end of the day, after the bad experience with the all powerful presidency under Mubarek, it is unlikely that any new president will be allowed to retain the same powers or will be greatly restrained by either public scrutiny and fears or by the new constitution; finally
d)El Baradei is in a weak position politically. He is considered an “outsider” who jetted in to Egypt on occasion, he didn’t live their life for the last fifteen years. His voice and concerns were not heeded over the rush to approve the referendum or the make up of the interim govt. His supporters in the “youth revolution” are young, inexperienced and disorganized. The politically savvy MB know that, if El Baradei gets elected, he will owe his allegiance to the MB and will have little support within the Assembly to thwart their plans since his supporters will be hard pressed to come up with 20% of the block.
One other thing, with the issue of the presidency and retaining any strength, the MB are going to be shooting for becoming the block that can form the government. In other words, they want to take the prime minister’s position and have a large role in selecting the cabinet members that will reside over the various govt institutions. I believe that they believe this will be the basis of power in the new Egypt.
Predicting elections, as we all know, is fraught with risk, but I’m going to go out on a long limb here and predict that the Muslim Brotherhood somehow miraculously emerges as the dominant force after Egypt’s first and last real election.
The MB will be like any other politician including Mubarak – they had better produce jobs, higher wages, cheaper food and better education or they will be standing right next to Mubarak, out on their ear.
The shrill cries about ‘one vote, one time’ is nonsense. If the MB had the wherewithal to take over the country after being elected in they wouldn’t have to be elected in in the first place.
The real power behind the uprising had an economic imperative and not a religious one; if it is denied they will take down the MB just like they did Mubarak. Unless one is expecting the army to mass convert to radicalism I wouldn’t be counting on a religious ‘awakening’ in Egypt.
Any politician with brains could run on a platform showing how the MB would in fact wreck the place economically and make enemies abroad to enhance that wreckage. The Egyptian people have proven that they are no longer susceptible to the threat of street violence which is the only weapon the MB would really have to seize power. The uprising was broad based enough that if the MB somehow got the army on their side, the army would in effect be shooting at their own cross section of people.
Religious fanatics are easier to select out and shoot down if it comes to that rather than taxi drivers, kids, women, bakers, lawyers and shopkeepers. The MB and salafist’s can control the street in certain areas but they cannot and did not cause the mass uprising.
What remains to be seen is something seen in the past and absent to this point and that is terrorism. It could be done like in Iraq where false attacks were made and blamed on the other side. Whoever takes this path takes the terrible risk of being shut out of Egypt’s future entirely if they are caught out. In the jockying for position in a nascent democratic situation, no one seems to feel threatened enough in terms of being shut out of the process to use violence to this point. If the various factions all get a little piece of the pie, the MB may be forced to take what they can get and like it.
There is no doubt the MB would like to exert their vision over the whole country – doesn’t every faction? The question is whether they can. One is going to come up with a whole lot more than the tired refrain of Iran, 1979, in order to come up with a convincing scenario where radicals seize power in Egypt. The military again affirmed today that all political parties will be prohibited from being based on religion.
Unlike Iran Egypt DOES have democratic institutions in place already to deal with the future; they may be hollow but they exist and are ready to exert themselves. Even Israel and Great Britain don’t have Constitutions so give these people a break before you start using moronic terms like ‘caliphates’ and putting Al-Queda tags on them.
Contrasting what is actually happening in Egypt with scenarios that involve half-truths and anecdotes and basically based on the intent of radicals without in any way addressing the ability to carry out that intent is the same stupefied reasoning that puts Chinese armies in Indonesia and Iran at the head of a united Caliphate.
All the fear mongering in the West together won’t create a combined arms military for China and Iran capable of actually doing anything no matter how much they want to. What you’re basically doing is listening to someone saying they can flap their arms and fly and you’re looking fearfully up in the sky and talking about how we should be ready to shoot them down.
People are ignoring the plain evidence of a man committing suicide for economic reasons in Tunisia, an economic uprising in Egypt, an uprising that started in a drought stricken and disenfranchised area of Syria and countries like Libya, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Jordan that have either majority or minority groups that feel disenfranchised. No where in all of this is there the slightest sign of a mass religious uprising but that is all some people see; to me that is pure ‘doublethink’ not to say wishful thinking.
How in the world can one look at such events in countries that are virtually entirely and officially muslim and parse them out to mean they are the result of wishing they were even more muslim? Trying to make a case that the uprisings have something to do with gov’t's being taken to task for not being anti-Western or anti-Israeli enough in sheer provincialism passing itself off as an understanding of global events. Not everything is about you – deal with it. Whatever anti-Israeli or anti-Western sentiments exist in these places are part and parcel of the cultures and have been for years and there is no evidence that people are eating bullets in the street because they feel overly constrained in expressing this or feel their gov’t's are not expressing this enough.
The forest for the trees is why Western journalist’s are being hung out to dry on this story as they are seeing what isn’t there, not seeing what is, and in effect passing out reports which all originate with the dateline: Plato’s Cave. They might as well be reporting from frickin’ Des Moines.
I’m not saying I know where any of this will lead but the idea of some kind of radical Pan-Arab Caliphate invoking the glory of Islam a thousand years gone is simply idiocy as each of these countries has their own culture, history of how they got to the present day and separate gripes.
I would agree with James that the likelihood of the “glorious caliphate” taking shape in Egypt as it stands today is not likely. Nor am I particularly interested in the continuing attempts to paint Egypt as the next terrorist Muslim state. At the expense, I might add, of people in the west refusing to give any voice to the liberals and, by fiat, helping to limit their power as important players in the shaping of Egypt.
On the other hand, the issue here is that, in the short run up to the parliament elections, aside from the NDP and it’s remnants forming a new party (which I just read about), the MB is the only player with the experience and organization to make a strong appearance.
This is not a matter, as James notes, of Egyptian’s dying to become more Islamic. Even the MB gets tired of the Salafis who are making their presence felt daily.
However, in politics, winning is not always about being the party with the right ideas. It is sometimes about the party that can have the most saturation in the public mind. This is a matter of the liberals losing the elections, not the MB winning.
Further, parliamentary elections with multiple parties taking seats means that the power to govern does not require a majority as we understand it in the United States with a two party system. A single party owning 30% of parliament can become the governing party if no other party or coalition of parties can create a similar or larger block.
So, let’s say that the NDP get’s 20% of the seats, labor gets 20%, the liberals get 15%, the marxists get 5% and the other 10% is made up of Copts or various smaller parties.
who would partner with the NDP to create a governing block? that would be political suicide (at least, they wouldn’t do it publicly as a governing block; blocking unwanted laws might be another matter).
Can labor and liberals work together to form a governing block? Would some of their necessarily different political desires (labor unions v. free markets) make them a fractured government, too weak to stave off the MB initiatives? Can the MB divide them on these issues?
What it amounts to is that the MB can act like a majority, even if they are the minority in parliament. That means that, despite what the majority of people may want, the MB may be able to sway the situation in their favor.
Now, the real question is, if we don’t like that sitation, how can we help empower the liberals (even labor, because that is better, at least, than an Islamist party) for the upcoming elections.