CAIRO, 10 September 2005 — Incumbent President Hosni Mubarak has won Egypt’s first contested presidential election with more than 80 percent of the votes, an official at the Higher Presidential Election Commission announced here yesterday.
Official results announced by commission Chairman Mamduh Marai gave the 77-year-old leader a whopping 88.5 percent of the votes in Wednesday’s election and put the turnout at 23 percent.
Ghad party leader Ayman Nour clinched second place with a paltry seven percent but challenged the results, claiming he had secured four times as many votes.
He said estimates based on his party representatives’ exit polls and assessments by judges manning the polling stations gave him between 30 and 38 percent of the votes.
“This is a fraud aimed at eliminating the only candidate who will still be alive for the 2011 presidential election,” the 40-year-old lawyer, by far the youngest candidate, told AFP. He said earlier that he had filed a new complaint with the electoral commission after his first appeal demanding a rerun was rejected.
Wafd party Chairman Noaman Gomaa, who came third with around three percent, also accused the regime of having tampered with the results. “There is a total collusion between the state apparatus and Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, which wanted to show it is going to remain the only party in Egypt,” said Gumaa.
The low participation reflected widespread skepticism among Egyptians over the government’s claims that the election opens the door to greater democratic reform — and apathy over a vote that Mubarak was certain to win.
Before Wednesday’s election, officials in Mubarak’s ruling party said they hoped at least 30 percent of the 32 million registered voters would cast ballots.
Marai, who is the top judge on Egypt’s highest court, said the vote was clean and that allegations of violations came out of “overenthusiasm in a nascent experiment that will be the cornerstone in the construction of democracy.”
A victory for Mubarak was a foregone conclusion but the turnout figure was always seen as key to his future legitimacy.
Although independent estimates put the turnout for previous elections below 10 percent, yesterday’s announcement silenced critics who predicted the regime would seek to hike the figure above 50 percent.
Forced voting, paid voters, unmanned polling stations, missing indelible ink and the use of public transport to ferry voters to polling stations were some of the accusations leveled against Mubarak supporters on election day.
But the electoral commission was satisfied with the polling process and many observers, while acknowledging some irregularities, took heart in the fact that Egypt’s first brush with democracy passed without any major incidents.
Boutros-Boutros Ghali, a former foreign minister and UN secretary-general, insisted that the climate of the election had been generally positive.
“The electoral process proceeded normally and no intervention by the security in the voting process in a way that undermined the freedom of voters or secrecy of the voting was observed,” he said in a preliminary report on the poll.
— With input from agencies
