Tuesday, Nov 15, 2005
Hopes that this month's parliamentary elections in Egypt would be fairer than in previous years began to fade on Tuesday amidst reports of widespread irregularities and scattered violence in first round run-offs.
President Hosni Mubarak's National Democratic Party (NDP) won 31 seats outright in voting last week in which most candidates from secular opposition parties were knocked out.
After decades in which opposition has been forcibly suppressed, the NDP is expected to maintain overwhelming dominance of parliament. But the elections - stretched nationwide over the month to allow judges to supervise polling - are being scrutinised at home and abroad for signs of commitment by the regime to greater democracy.
In yesterday's voting, the fault lines of Egyptian politics were more pronounced with the NDP facing a strong challenge in run-offs from independent candidates allied to the Muslim Brotherhood Egypt's largest and best-organised opposition force.
Despite being banned, the Islamist movement has been able to campaign freely for the first time and helped voters navigate through confusing voter registers with computers set up outside polling stations.
It did well enough in 42 of 164 constituencies contested last week to enter yesterday's run-offs. By the time polling is finished next month is hoping to have at least trebled the 15 seats its supporters hold in parliament. Civil society groups monitoring the polls said yesterday that police and security services had in some areas dropped the neutrality they observed last week seen by monitors as one principle gain.
Several independent groups said they also had evidence the voter register had been tampered with to allow public sector workers to vote en masse for embattled NDP candidates. "What they did is allow the last minute transfer of votes from one constituency to another in areas where they have an NDP person in trouble," said Gasser Abdelrazek, election-monitoring co-ordinator for the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR).
There were tense scenes in Nasr city, a sprawling Cairo district of concrete tenement blocks and industrial zones where these allegations were strongest. There, Mustafa Sallab, an NDP candidate and ceramics tycoon was facing the only woman running for the Muslim Brotherhood, Makarem al-Deiri.
At one polling station visited by the FT, workers from the Arab Contractors, a state construction company, were bussed in to vote in waves of hundreds. To enter the station, they had to run a gauntlet of Brotherhood supporters handing out leaflets and chanting religious slogans.
As workers filed past, one Brotherhood member warned that God would be "watching them in the polling booth."
Independent and opposition monitors at the station said most of the voters were not Cairo residents and many were being paid between 10 and 50 Egyptian pounds to back the NDP. Mohamed Kamal, a leading ruling party member and ally of the President's son Gamal, admitted some irregularities but said the party did not condone these. He denied there had been any tampering with the voter register.
Essam El-Erian, a senior figure in the Muslim Brotherhood still saw some progress. "It is the first time we have an election with none of our members in jail," he said.
William Wallis in Cairo
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