Egyptians vote in runoff elections

Voting has started in a second round of parliamentary elections in Egypt, a week after the first round was condemned for alleged fraud. Egypt’s ruling party, The National Democratic Party (NDP), which has never lost an election, is set on Sunday to win all but a handful of seats that may be taken up by minor parties with no significant grass-roots support, after the Muslim Brotherhood and the liberal Wafd party pulled out.

With the Brotherhood sidelined from formal politics, the government’s main critics have one less platform for attack as Egypt heads towards a 2011 presidential election whose outcome is more uncertain.
The runoffs are being held in 114 seats where candidatess failed to secure the necessary 50 per cent of votes needed for an outright win in the first round.
With the principal opposition groups boycotting the runoffs, mostly rival NDP candidates are in the fray on Sunday and subsequently the party is set to take about 95 per cent of the vote.

‘Internal party convention’

Ayman Mohyeldin, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in the capital Cairo, said: “If the first round was any indicator – and that was when two large opposition groups were involved – the voter turnout was by some estimates as low as 10 per cent, that’s mostly by civil society and independent observers.
“The Egyptian government put the voter turnout at nearly 35 per cent. One thing you can rest assured though is that voter turnout today by any measure will not be any way nearly as close, particularly for two reasons.
“One, the two major opposition groups, the Muslim Brotherhood – which fields candidates as independents – and the Waft party – Egypt’s secular opposition – both have withdrawn after the first round because of irregularities that they said have corrupted the voting process.
“So, this is widely seen as an internal party convention more so than an election between various parties.”
President Hosni Mubarak, 82, has no vice-president, unlike his two predecessors, and no clear successor after 29 years at the helm of the Arab world’s most populous country.
Many Egyptians say he may be grooming his 46-year-old son for power but analysts say Gamal Mubarak lacks the common touch, and the support from the military, that helped cement his father’s 29-year tenure.
The scale of the government’s first-round win – the NDP took 209 out of 221 seats in the November 28 vote – was a surprise.
Political analysts had expected the Brotherhood to pick up at least some seats but it won none. Other opposition parties and independents won 12 seats.

Reported irregularities

The state High Elections Commission said there were reports of some irregularities but not enough to discredit the vote.
The United States, Egypt’s main ally and a major donor, said it was “dismayed” by the reports of disruption of campaign activities, arrests of supporters and the denial of access to the media for some opposition voices.
Hassan Nafaa, a political analyst at Cairo University, said: “This delegitimises the system, and if there are intentions for Gamal Mubarak to be the next presidential candidate, there will be more room for people to question the credibility of such an act.”
A state news website quoted sources as saying on Friday that there could be a cabinet reshuffle, but Ahmed Nazif, the Egyptian prime minister, was likely to remain consistent.
The Muslim Brotherhood, which campaigns for an Islamic state and skirts a ban on religious parties by fielding candidates as independents, held 86 seats in the outgoing parliament. After winning no first-round seats, it said on Wednesday it was pulling out of the second-round runoff, in which it had 26 candidates.
Wafd, the next biggest opposition group, won two seats in the first round but has said it will not take them up.

Opposition absence

The departure of the main opposition parties does not mean passion will be entirely absent from Sunday’s runoff.
Several outbreaks of violence and injuries reported during last week’s vote were linked to clashes between ruling party candidates.
“Self-interest and benefits are the main motives behind joining the NDP. There is always rivalry between NDP candidates who compete to the point of violence to get to parliament,” Amr Hamzawi, of the Carnegie Middle East Centre in Beirut, said.
Egypt’s High Administrative Court on Saturday criticised the election commission for allowing polls to proceed in 24 districts last week despite court rulings halting them after many opposition candidates complained of being disqualified.
The court said in a statement: “The High Elections Commission’s non-implementation of previous rulings nullifies the results [in these districts], making the composition of the People’s Assembly fraught with the suspicion of invalidity.”

Source: Agencies