CAIRO: A hint of change enlivened Egyptian politics this year when President Hosni Mubarak’s opponents awoke from a long slumber and took to the streets in protest at 24 years of government by one president and one party.
But at the end of a three-week parliamentary election process starting on Wednesday, and after months of talk around the world about reform and democracy in the Middle East, little may have changed in the Arab world’s most populous nation.
Mubarak is safely installed for a fifth six-year term, after presidential elections in September, and analysts are predicting that his ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) will end up with a comfortable majority in the People’s Assembly.
They say turnout in the parliamentary elections will again be very low — another sign that advocates of change have failed to mobilise millions of Egyptians to take part in politics.
Even if the elections are free and fair, in the end it is the organising capacity of the NDP, which for the past 30 years has acted as the political wing of the executive, that will carry the day at the polling stations, the analysts say.
Opposition politicians who reckoned on splits within the ruling party, between an old guard and a group of young economic liberals, have already been disappointed as the two sides rally around to preserve their control over the levers of power.
The NDP’s main problem has been an embarrassment of riches — so many people wanted to stand as NDP candidates that it had to turn them away. Many of them are standing as independents but if they win the party is likely to take them back into the fold.
The only novelties this year are the stronger than usual challenge from the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood, the relative neutrality of the security forces and increased access to the state media for opposition candidates, the analysts say.
“The NDP machine is still the same machine in the same old hands. It still relies on government and the bureaucracy and on election day I guess the state will be mobilised to bring in the votes,” said Walid Kazziha, professor of political science at the American University in Cairo.
“For democratic elections you need political parties with grassroots... We don’t have that. It’s opening up but I would not expect that for another 10 years,” he added.
The elections, which take place every five years, have an extra importance this time because of a constitutional amendment which sets a five per cent threshold for parties which want to field presidential candidates during the term of the parliament.
If no single opposition party wins at least 23 seats — five percent of 444 elected seats — the NDP would be the only party with a candidate in presidential elections held before 2010 — if Mubarak, 77, died or retired, for example.
Hala Mustafa, an NDP policy committee member and editor of the quarterly Democracy Review, said: “I expect that the NDP will have the same majority as in the last election because the NDP is still powerful when it comes to its linkage with security institutions and the bureaucratic authority.
Estimates for the number of likely winners from the Muslim Brotherhood winners, competing as independents because the government does not let them have a political party, vary from the 20s to the 60s, compared with 17 in the 2000 election.
But already back in the 1980s the moderate Islamist movement had 35 members of parliament.
The secular opposition, fragmented between leftists, Arab nationalists and economic liberals, failed to mount a united front against Mubarak in the presidential elections in September, in which Mubarak took 89 per cent of the vote.
In the parliamentary elections 11 parties and movements have done better, patching together a National Front fielding 222 candidates and picking the people most likely to defeat the NDP.
But the alliance excluded the Ghad (Tomorrow) Party of young liberal lawyer Ayman Nour, who came second to Mubarak in the presidentials with eight per cent of the vote, and Nour has had legal and party problems to distract him from campaigning.
Mohamed el-Sayyed Said, an analyst at the Ahram Centre for Strategic and Political Studies, said he thought the Brotherhood had lost ground.—Reuters
