CAIRO: Less than a fifth of the electorate voted for the incumbent Hosni Mubarak in Egypt’s presidential poll, curtailing the veteran leader’s legitimacy as he kicks off his last mandate.
According to the official results of Egypt’s first contested presidential election announced by the electoral commission on Friday, Mubarak mustered a whopping 88.5 per cent of the vote.
But in the same way that his score exceeded most expectations, the turnout rate of 23 per cent was lower than predicted by many observers.
“The central phenomenon of this election is the slump in turnout. It had always been low but this figure is very significant,” political analyst Mohammed Said Sayed told AFP.
Less than 20 per cent of the electorate cast their ballot in favour of the leader who has already ruled Egypt for 24 years. These 6.3 million voters also represent less than 10 per cent of the country’s total population.
“It (the turnout) points to a total indifference towards the election. We can say there was a boycott of the election. The message is clear, it’s a vote of no confidence for Mubarak and the regime,” said Sayed from the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
While government officials dwelt on a score which they claimed demonstrated the people’s faith in their long-time ruler, Mubarak’s defeated election rivals were quick to charge that the low turnout pointed to the contrary.
Wafd party chairman Numan Gumaa, who came third with a paltry 2.9 per cent of the vote in Wednesday’s elections, found consolation in the low turnout.
“No candidate would have obtained such a score in a democratic country,” he told AFP, adding that the turnout figure was proof that ‘the Egyptian people do not trust the regime’.
Many observers and opposition leaders had predicted that the regime would seek to boost the turnout figure to around 50 per cent in order to secure more popular legitimacy for Mubarak.
But the low turnout acknowledged by the electoral commission was still higher than the estimates floated by independent groups and party delegates who monitored the poll.
The Ibn Khaldun Center, which deployed some 2,200 monitors across the country for Egypt’s first multi-candidate presidential polls, had said on Thursday in a preliminary report that turnout would hover around 18 per cent.
The organization is headed by Saadeddin Ibrahim, a respected US-Egyptian sociologist and rights activist.
Gumaa’s party and others had put the figure at around 15 per cent.
Observers warned during the campaign that voters accustomed to having no impact whatsoever on the country’s political life would not flock to polling stations for the landmark September 7 election.
Several leading opposition movements, such as the Marxist Tagammu, the Nasserist party and the anti-Mubarak group Kefaya (Enough), had campaigned for a boycott of an election they had branded as rigged from the start.
Apathy may not be the only factor behind the weak turnout, as all accounts of the polling process showed it was mired in confusion.
Polling stations were unmarked, voter registers often inaccurate and monitors abundantly documented cases of Egyptians spending hours looking in vain for their polling booth.
The electoral commission itself admitted to flaws in the organization.
The country’s judges — who were tasked with supervising the polling process — are preparing a report on election day.
Their syndicate had threatened to boycott the election on the grounds that they were not given sufficient independence from the state.
Their turnout figure for the May referendum on poll reform which allowed for the first contested presidential elections was around 10 times lower than the official rate announced by the regime.—AFP
