CAIRO, 27 May 2005 — Almost 83 percent of voters approved a key amendment to the constitution that will allow Egypt’s first contested presidential elections, Interior Minister Habib Al-Adli said yesterday, announcing the result of a referendum held Wednesday on the issue.
He said the results of the vote counting in 329 main polling stations across the country showed that 82.8 percent of the Egyptians who voted said yes to the amendment. The turnout was 53 percent of the 32.5 million registered voters, the minister added.
The new amendment stipulates that a candidate has the backing of 250 elected members of the lower and upper houses of Parliament and city councils, all of which are dominated by the National Democratic Party (NDP) headed by President Hosni Mubarak.
Under the constitution, the amendment needs at least 51 percent of “yes” votes to get an endorsement. The Cabinet will draft an election law regulating the election process next Sunday.
“The results we have today are unprecedented in the history of Egypt,” said Habib. “If you look at any of the previous presidential referendums you will see that this year’s turnout was higher, which is politically healthy,” Habib told reporters.
According to the government, the turnout was high in southern governorates and in some provinces in the Delta while it was poor in Cairo. The number of Egyptian voters who said yes to the amendment was also higher in the southern governorates by at least 15 percent.
In the southern province of Assiut, for instance, the judicial committee which supervised voting said that the number of votes cast was 72.9 percent of the number of registered voters and that 98.2 percent of valid votes were “Yes”.
“Many people will be surprised by the results in southern and Delta governorates but the reality is that this is expected since people there are less educated and do not realize the meaning of the amendment,” said Muhammad Al-Sayyed Said, a political analysts at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. “Also the opposition efforts to persuade people to stay away from the polls were not so strong there as in other areas,” he told Arab News.
George Isshak, the spokesman of Kefaya (Enough) movement, alleged the government bribed people in the countryside to vote yes. “People there are very poor and for them to have extra pounds is more important than saying no to the constitution amendment,” he claimed.
Egypt’s biggest opposition parties — the Wafd, Tagmmua, the Nasserist, the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Ghad — boycotted the elections saying the reforms did not go far enough.
Pro-Mubarak demonstrators and protesters from Kefaya clashed in downtown Cairo on Wednesday resulting in some injuries. Kefaya said two of their members were beaten up during the scuffles and that police stood watching.
Kefaya spokesman Abdel Halim Qandil said 10 members of Kefaya were arrested during the demonstrations and 20 members of other oppositions groups were rounded up in Cairo and other northwestern provinces.
Yesterday, US President George W. Bush condemned the attacks on demonstrators.
“The idea of people expressing themselves and opposition of the government and getting a beating is not our view of how a democracy ought to work. It’s not the way that you have a free election.
“People ought to be allowed to express themselves and I’m hopeful that the president will have open elections, that everybody can have trust in,” Bush said in a joint press conference with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the White House Rose Garden.
— Additional input from agencies
