Travails of Egypt’s presidential elections
Egyptians feel like they were born again,” Osama Abdel, a 58-year-old voter was quoted as saying after he left a polling station in Cairo. “This is the first time — since the Ottomans.”
Abdel was referring to the strong turnout in Egypt’s landmark presidential election last Wednesday and Thursday, which were free and orderly, and according to accredited monitors showed no signs of the type of widespread, state-sanctioned fraud that had in the past kept the deposed President Hosni Mubarak in power for 30 years. It was additionally a landmark event because for Egyptians, who for generations had dismissed elections as charades designed to give regimes in power a veneer of legitimacy, this one was a first in Egypt’s modern history, going back in fact to long before Ottoman rule. The Ottoman empire, truth be told, was not noted as a polity that chalked up a richly deserved reputation for democratic governance. But we know what Abdel was talking about — the only election in memory, in his homeland, that was free of fraud and violence, and whose outcome was not preordained.
Among the four frontrunners, the two Islamist candidates, Abdel Muneim Aboul Fottouh and Mohammed Mursi, appeared to be logical representatives of, or to have an agenda responsive to, the ascendant national mood in Egypt today. But it is the other two, Amr Musa and Ahmad Shafiq, who appeared to be an anomaly. They are both polarizing figures resurrected and dusted off from the attic of the old Mubarak era. Some may have voted for them as an alternative to the Islamist-dominated Parliament, but others — many others, and not all Islamists — see them as distrusted figures who may return Egypt to the repression, corruption and lack of accountability of the former regime.
Shafiq in particular, who was Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister, and has the backing of Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, who has served as the country’s de facto leader since the revolutionary uprising 15 months ago, has taken on an over-confident, pugnacious and combative posture during his campaign. He has promised to “counter the rise of political Islam,” contending vaingloriously that he is “by experience able, 100 percent, to control this phenomenon.” Moreover, he has threatened to “halt all demonstrations” if elected president. And in an interview last month, he explained that Mubarak was “a role model and a father figure, who had great courage.”
Election results show that no candidate is expected to win a majority of the vote in the first round of balloting, which will result in the top two vote-getters meeting in a run-off in June. Then whoever the winner of that is, well, is the winner, and the Egyptian people will have go along to get along. Yet a victory by Shafiq, a former air force officer, on the walls of whose campaign headquarters are plastered posters of him posing with Tantawi, would clearly polarize society in post-revolutionary Egypt, and strengthen the hand of military rulers, who have shown themselves resistant to reform and anxious to protect their privileges and vast economic interests. It would also mean that Egypt would continue on its unmerry way of being a country ruled by military brass since 1952, when a clique of so-called Free Officers Movement, led by Gamal Abdul Nasser, overthrew the monarchy. All of which is hardly a display of the kind of meaningful, let alone revolutionary, change that Egyptians have been clamoring for and for which nearly 1,000 of them have died.
It’s a given, of course, that choosing a leader in a democracy is determined by elections. And in the kerfuffle that dominates the public debate, anywhere in the world today, the Western concept of democracy is seen as the terminus in conceptualizing the notion of just governance, or the notion of the social contract between ruler and ruled. Thus the Euro-American world is excluding a major part of past and contemporary humanity from the pale of significant political experience. In other words, be democratic like us, or be damned. To prosper, embrace democracy. Reject this ethnocentric view of how people should run their lives, and live in a failed state.
Humbug! India and China give such a myth the lie. India, a country that has practiced democratic rule since its emergence as an independent state in 1947, remains an economically destitute nation with an overwhelming majority of its population impoverished and malnourished. China, on the other hand, with a pervasive, one-party system of government, and hardly a model of democratic rule, is well poised on its way to becoming a superpower.
I don’t know if the Egyptian revolution, when it burst on the scene well over a year ago in Tahrir Square, enlisted John Locke, Jean Jacque Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson as its guiding lights, but I do know that Egyptians, heirs to a long and rich civilization and traditions simply embraced the concept of social justice, economic equity, individual freedom and human rights — or, conversely, rejected corruption, repression, unfettered power and elite exploitation. If this indigenous agenda is in tune with what they call democracy in London, Paris and Washington, then so be it. Nobody is in dispute here.
I would just hate to see, as I’m sure you would, the Egyptian revolution hijacked, perhaps by some electoral fluke, perhaps by a block of misinformed votes, perhaps by fear of the innovative in a country who citizenry have been socialized for generations to fear innovation — and go through potentialities of crisis and reversal.
For make no mistake about it, there are elements in Egypt, and not just those ensconced in military barracks, who would like nothing more than to have the country returned to the status quo ante.
If that were to happen in the run-off next month, reaction will have its day, and revolution its eclipse.
