Egypt: parties v individuals
Electoral law reserving the bulk of parliamentary seats for independent candidates will protect executive power
Hossam Eldin Ali sits in his office in Maadi, an upscale neighbourhood on the outskirts of Cairo. He complains of the obstacles he faces in creating his new liberal opposition party, the Liberal Youth Party.
To register, he says, he needs thousands of signatures of supporters from across the country, each certified by the authorities—a feat that will cost about $100,000, he estimates. To run his campaign he must get police permission because a new law bans protests without prior approval. Media coverage is almost impossible because the press is hostile to anyone opposing the regime, he says.
Despite these roadblocks, Mr Eldin Ali, 38, is determined to create a strong party. But his biggest hurdle are new laws designed, he says, to deliberately weaken parties.
Two days before he left office in June 2014, former interim president Adly Mansour passed a law reserving 420 of Parliament’s 567 seats (about 75%) for individual candidates who do not run on a registered party ticket. Individual-candidate systems favour local, powerful businessmen or political actors eager to ingratiate themselves with a president, over opposition parties.
“We believe this was done on purpose” to bolster the president and keep the opposition down, Mr Eldin Ali says. “It means we won’t be able to get a majority in Parliament” to counterbalance the president’s power, he adds.
Since the July 2013 military overthrow of Egypt’s first freely elected president, Muhammad Morsi, space for dissent has shrunk. After labelling Egypt’s largest opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist organisation, the interim government banned its political wing, the Freedom and Justice Party. It also excluded other Islamist parties under a clause in the country’s new constitution that outlaws religion-based parties.
With last May’s presidential elections dominated by former army general Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and the country heading towards a Parliament comprised of individuals and not political parties, many fear Egypt is returning to the days when the opposition was co-opted and became a tool to legitimise authoritarianism.
When Mr Sisi swept the May poll with 96.1% of the vote, foreign observers from the European Union and other independent monitoring groups concluded that the repressive political environment made a genuinely democratic election impossible.
Hamdeen Sabbahi of the left-wing Egyptian Popular Current party was Mr Sisi’s sole challenger. He admitted before the elections that he believed the playing ground was uneven, but still participated.During the elections, Mr Sabbahi’s campaign withdrew its monitors from polling stations, complaining that security forces were excluding, assaulting and even arresting their observers. Despite this, Mr Sabbahi accepted the results.
For many, this was evidence that he was no more than a pawn used to legitimise the election.“He knew the elections were manipulated and he still accepted the elections: this isn’t real opposition,” says Ahmad Abd Allah, a leader of the now-banned April 6 Movement, one of the pro-democracy youth groups that led the 2011 revolution which toppled Hosni Mubarak. “Hamdeen Sabbahi was just part of the game.”
The 2014 constitution grants wide-ranging powers to Parliament. Its mixed system framework allows the majority party or coalition to form a government with its leader as the prime minister and the second head of executive authority after the president.
But these powers will be irrelevant without strong parties. For this reason, opposition forces have roundly condemned the new electoral law.
“Egypt has become adept in putting into place electoral systems that look democratic on the face, but really what they’ve done is they’ve cherry-picked provisions and put them together into a system intended to confine competition,” says Michele Dunne, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Middle East programme, and a specialist on Egypt.
Mr Sisi and his supporters claim the new law opens the political process to independent individuals without party backing. Following the 2011 revolution, when Mubarak-era restrictions on forming new parties were lifted, a host of newly formed liberal parties with little experience in mobilising voters gained few seats. Islamists, notably the Muslim Brotherhood, with a long history of organised opposition, became the dominant force in Parliament.
Ms Dunne says she expects to see competition at a local level, with supporters of the pre-revolutionary regime and pro-military figures competing against each other, while liberal parties will be at a disadvantage. A clause in the country’s new constitution bans religion-based parties, which means Islamist parties are excluded almost entirely.
During Mr Morsi’s rule, the Islamist-dominated Parliament hastily pushed through similarly controversial electoral laws, seen by the liberal opposition to favour Islamists.
Ironically, it is members of the old guard, banned from politics while the Islamists ruled, who will benefit from the latest system, Ms Dunne says. “What we’ve seen repeatedly, including from the Brotherhood when it was in power, is those in power trying to impose their will on the others, as opposed to hammering out deals among different political actors, such as you’ve seen in Tunisia,” Ms Dunne says.
Amy Hawthorne, a resident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, says “legal opposition” is “a strange term when you have a protest law that doesn’t allow people to protest, and very, very circumscribed rights and freedom, and there isn’t really opposition allowed…in any meaningful way.”
Under the new electoral law, Egypt’s parliament will be fractured and confusing. Many independent candidates, detached from political parties, will be unable to cohere in any significant way to offer a check on executive power. “Unfortunately, it may provide further example to the Egyptian public of how ineffective civic politics and civilian politicians are,” she says. Parliament will become a “very feckless body that can’t get anything done, thereby further reinforcing the image of Sisi and a military-backed president as the only real alternative…who can be competent and effective.”
Many Egyptians, particularly the youth, have already shown signs that they are losing faith in the political process altogether. In the 2013 presidential elections, 46% of nearly 54m registered voters cast ballots, according to the government. In the referendum on the constitution in January, voter turnout fell to just 38.6%, according to the Supreme Electoral Commission. “The youth don’t believe that there is a democratic process. They aren’t interested and this won’t allow for real political parties to develop,” April 6’s Mr Abd Allah says.
As a result, many feel the only true opposition will come from outside the legal political spectrum. “A real opposition will come from the streets, will come from groups and movements that are being repressed,” Ms Hawthorne says. “And that’s always the danger; that there is no…political outlet for those people. That’s when you risk heading down a bad path.”
