Election Fever In Egypt

By Michael Jansen

This comment was published in The Jordan Times on 25/11/2010

Gamila Ismail is an independent candidate running for a seat outside the women’s quota in Egypt’s 508 member people’s assembly. She is a well-known figure in Cairo. She stood for parliament in 2001 and campaigned for the release from prison of her former husband Ayman Nour, the head of opposition Al Ghad party who ran and lost the presidential race in 2005.

Gamila met the world press at 7.30 on Monday at the Cilantro cafژ in Zamalek, a large island in the Nile. The BBC and CNN were there, as well as Swedish, German and Irish journalists. Her shining brown hair brushed her shoulders, her lips pursed in determination, she set out to challenge the government by campaigning in two of its forbidden strongholds.

Her first target were four private schools in Zamalek, a middle- and upper-middle-class residential area also housing embassies, cultural centres and high-rise hotels. She set off on her mission in a gleaming black car plastered with election posters. She began with the Port Said school, a small building on a leafy street.

“I want to reach parents through their children and move new voters” to register and cast ballots.

“I will hand out my brochures and speak to teachers. This is not legal, but the NDP [the ruling National Democratic Party] has been in the schools for years.”

She was able to speak to students only at the American City Schools, where she told three somewhat embarrassed teenagers that they should vote when they come of age and gave them her election brochures to pass on to their parents.

Strolling between schools, she stopped at shops selling beautiful fruit - piles of oranges, bananas and custard apples - to shake hands with proprietors and customers and distribute her leaflets. At the Gomhoria Butchery, she chatted with Fateh Said Muhammad, who stopped dressing a beef fillet to smile for a snap of Gamila and himself beneath a photo of Egyptian film star Omar Sharif, a good customer.

“If he were running, I would vote for him,” stated the butcher.

Gamila’s next halt was at the symbol of the modern Egyptian state, the Mogamma, the monumental office bloc at Tahrir Square, the core of this vast city of 18 million people. Here, thousands of civil servants - mostly women - provide documents needed by Egyptians to carry on their daily lives. Gamila waited patiently for permission to enter because by law, campaigning is banned in government buildings.

Eventually the security man ushered her - and the pencil press - into this vast edifice where she toured the dusty, dreary offices on the seventh floor. In the first room she entered, Gamila faced an angry woman in niqab.

“I protest the price of meat. We cannot afford to live... I have been working here for 27 years. I get 500 pounds a month ($90). If I go to vote, I am doing wrong.”

Gamila took issue with the woman, arguing that if the people do not tell the government what they want by voting, there will be no change. She was received more warmly in other offices where women livened up the environment by draping their battered steel desks with bright flower print cloths and plastic flowers.

While they listened politely to Gamila, most of these women will vote for her main rival, Hisham Moustafa Khalil, the son of a former foreign minister and an influential member of the NDP.

The party expects to win a solid majority of seats in Sunday’s election. There are 5,100 candidates standing for the 508 elected seats. Some 1,200 candidates represent 14 political parties, while 4,100 are running as independents, the majority of them members of the NDP who were not chosen as official candidates.

To complicate matters, the NDP is fielding 780 official candidates rather than one per seat. Since many are competing for the same seats, there has been a certain amount of intimidation and bullying of voters by NDP rivals.

The liberal Wafd party, established in 1918, has put forward 250 candidates, the second largest list of official contestants.

The Muslim Brotherhood, which is officially banned but allowed to support independents, originally chose 132 candidates, but the election commission reduced the number to 75. The NDP is keen to cut down the representation of the Brotherhood, which won 88 seats in the 2005 444-seat parliament.

The leftist Tagammu has put forward 70 candidates, the largest number ever.

This election is of considerable importance because Egyptians are set to vote next year in a presidential election which could give President Hosni Mubarak a sixth term or confirm a successor chosen by the NDP. For the time being, the NDP regards the president as the only candidate.