Egypt Election 2011: Facts and Figures for Parliamentary Vote
November 29, 2011, 3:10 AM ESTBy Digby Lidstone and Mariam Fam
Nov. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Egyptians begin voting today in the first parliamentary elections since the uprising that ousted President Hosni Mubarak in February. Following are facts and figures on the voting.
Timetable: Voting for the lower house of parliament takes place in three stages, corresponding to three sets of governorates. Polls open in Cairo, Alexandria and seven other provinces on Nov. 28, with a second round of voting to decide seats with no outright majority scheduled for Dec. 5. Voting in provinces including Giza, Aswan and Suez begins on Dec. 14, with run-offs on Dec. 21. The third round of voting, for the North and South Sinai and seven other governorates, takes place on Jan. 3 with a run-off on Jan. 10. Each round of voting will take two days. Final results are due by Jan. 13.
Later elections: Voting for the upper house begins in January. Egypt’s ruling military council has said it will transfer power to an elected president before the end of June, without specifying a date for the presidential vote.
Parliament: Egypt’s parliament is divided into an upper house, the Shura Council, and the lower house, or People’s Assembly.
The lower house, which is the country’s main legislative body, has 498 elected members and as many as 10 others appointed by the president.
Voting: Two-thirds of the assembly are elected using a complex, closed proportional list system via 46 multiseat districts, while the remaining third, or 166, of the members are elected via 83 two-seat constituencies. In both cases, half of the elected members must be classified as “workers and farmers” (see Eligibility, below).
Voters cast two ballots, the first for one candidate list of their choice, and the second for the two-seat constituency where they choose two candidates.
Supervision: The elections commission supervises all aspects of the poll, from registration of voters and candidates to the counting of ballots. It comprises seven of Egypt’s most senior judges. The ruling military council has said it won’t allow international monitoring of the voting but “observers” are welcome.
Eligibility: Candidates must be over 25 and have a father who is an Egyptian citizen. The clause on “workers and farmers,” a legacy of the socialist presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser, stipulates that candidates must be registered with a labor union and not have a university degree to qualify as a worker. “Farmers” must derive their main source of income from agriculture and own less than 10 feddans (10.4 acres) of land.
Voters must be 18 or over. Members of the armed forces and police, convicted criminals, those who’ve been declared bankrupt and people in the care of mental health institutions aren’t eligible to vote. Egyptians abroad began voting via their embassies on Nov. 23.
Parties: With more than 50 parties registered by the time the election process started in September, the political spectrum in Egypt ranges from small parties formed to support a single candidate to larger groupings such as the Democratic Alliance.
Adding to the confusion for voters is the presence of politicians from the former ruling National Democratic Party, now dissolved, who are running on new platforms. One-third of seats in the upper and lower houses of parliament will be filled using a first-past-the-post system that favors candidates with strong local ties, which includes many former NDP members.
Egyptian law forbids overtly religious parties from running, hence candidates from the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest de-facto opposition group under Mubarak, run as members of the Freedom and Justice Party. Other Islamist groups have adopted nominally secular platforms.
Salafi groups, who follow a strict interpretation of Islam, have emerged from relative obscurity since the ouster of Mubarak, and are represented by a range of political parties including the Nour Party.
Many Egyptian political parties reject the labels applied to them by outside commentators, with the Freedom and Justice Party declaring it itself a civil party and others such as the Wafd Party dismissing the notion that they are “liberal.”
Wafd was born as a nationalist movement opposed to British rule and was Egypt’s most powerful party in the early decades of the 20th century. Banned following the revolution of 1952, its popularity has waned since.
An early attempt to form a Democratic Alliance across the spectrum of groups was largely undermined as secular parties including Wafd defected, leaving the alliance dominated by the Freedom and Justice party.
The Free Egyptians Party, co-founded by billionaire Naguib Sawiris, is a main member in the Egyptian Bloc alliance, which also includes Tagammu and the Egyptian Social Democrats.
Youth organizations played a key role in the uprising that led to the ouster of Mubarak, from groups such as the “We are all Khaled Said” movement that helped organize the first protests in January to the Alliance of the Youth Revolution, which brings together representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Youth Movement for Justice and Freedom and the National Association for Change, among others.
While they have retained a presence in Egyptian politics through the demonstrations Cairo’s Tahrir Square and other cities, the influence such youth movements can bring to bear in elections hasn’t yet been tested. Many have called for the postponement of voting and reform of the electoral process, amid concerns that the Muslim Brotherhood, which played little part in the earliest days of the protests, and former NDP members will have an unfair advantage in the ballot.
--Editors: Andrew J. Barden, Ann Hughey.
To contact the reporters on this story: Digby Lidstone in Cairo at dlidstone@bloomberg.net; Mariam Fam in Cairo at mfam1@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Andrew J. Barden at barden@bloomberg.net.
