Pre-Election Thoughts

While there are hugely important elections coming up soon in the United States, parliamentary elections are right around the corner here as well. Slated for November 28, the elections exist essentially to reinforce the power of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) via the creation of a sham legislature. While the legislature constitutionally has some power, the executive typically promulgates vast majority of legislation, and even that which is passed by the legislature is typically a simple rubber stamp of a preexisting NDP policy.

Taking this into account, why do we care about Egyptian elections? Why not boycott them, like Muhammad Baradei has chosen to do? There are two sides to the story for both the state and party itself. First and foremost for the state, elections serve as a sort of safety valve for dictatorial regimes. In times of stress, such as those in the late 1980s in Jordan or in between 1990 and 1994 in Yemen, regimes undertook a moderate loosening of their typically rigid stance on political parties and parliamentary authority in general and allowed more parties to run, enabling the IAF in Jordan and Islah in Yemen to attain more in way of political sway. This sort of stalled liberalization enables regimes to tout the changes they have made in recent years while denying access to the political process to peripheral movements (or, in the case of Yemen, using the election to make winning parties dependent on the state for relevancy). In the case of Egypt, parties such as Wafd, Tagammu', or Ayman Nour's al-Ghad have accept a rather non-confrontational role relative to that which we typically assign to the Muslim Brotherhood here in Egypt. These parties continually question the actions of the NDP, though they do not put forward many candidates in elections out of fear of losing their status as a recognized party (an understandable fear when these parties lack the grassroots organization the Ikhwan possesses). In addition to serving as a safety valve, elections serve as a means by which the state can provide a sort of moral legitimacy to policy. Even though the executive essentially rules by decree, the parliament still serves as a means by which patronage is disbursed to those fortunate enough to receive it among the general population and thus assure continued elite support for the regime.

So taking into account the relative inefficacy of the parliament and the risks posed by running for office, why participate in the first place? For many parties, past decisions to boycott have led to borderline irrelevance within Egyptian political discourse. No one considers al-Ghad to be the default opposition in spite of Ayman Nour's relatively successful run (meaning he obtained 7% of the vote) against Hosni Mubarak for the office of the presidency (and subsequent jailing on trumped-up charges) in 2005. The dichotomy people talk about is the NDP versus the Society of Muslim Brothers. In the 2005 parliamentary elections, the Ikwan won a shocking 88 seats in the parliament, the most won by an opposition in years, and far more than the NDP wanted the opposition to maintain. The Ikhwan is not allowed to run as an official party; all of their candidates must register as independents, which requires them to obtain 250 signatures from members of the People's Assembly (parliament), Shura Council, and various municipal councils. In spite of this, likely electoral fraud, voter intimidation, poll access denial, and mass arrests leading up to and following the election, the Ikhwan performed far beyond expectations. While limited in their ability to do anything in the People's Assembly, it gave them an element of respectability even in Western arenas they did not have previously and made them a focal point for opposition to the regime. If these are the types of benefits one could accrue from performing, why not run?

Personally, I never expected to be in favor of boycotting elections, though I increasingly find myself seeing it as a wise decision for political parties. For most movements, it allows them to avoid the massive arrests most movements are subjected to before elections. This year, there is a fairly wide-held anticipation that this year's crackdown will be particularly brutal, and 12 were killed and 500 injured on election day alone in 2005. Arrests have begun, communications are becoming far more restricted, and opposition advertisements are hard to find in spite of the prevalence of NDP posters advertising their candidates strewn across Cairo and cities around the country (I've never seen as many political advertisements as I did in Marsa Matrouh). Most people I have talked to have said this seems worse than in years past, though I obviously have no way to verify this based on my limited time here. So political movements can guarantee that they can live to fight another day rather than fight for a post in a toothless parliament and maybe hope to gain some of the international or grassroots support necessary to their survival on Egypt's highly controlled political scene. Furthermore, an election in which the NDP wins 518 out of 518 seats would look far worse to the international community than one in which a minority party actually wins a sizable chunk of the electorate. It could draw international attention to Egypt's political flaws in a way even a legitimate parliamentary election never could. Whether or not it actually would is questionable at best, though when we're thinking on the margins in terms of what is a preferable choice between a crackdown and international involvement, the latter seems more beneficial in my eyes.

One way or another, a lot of attention will be drawn onto the Emergency Law this year. The Emergency Law is a clause of the Constitution that can be activated in the case of a threat to the state. Activated in 1981 following the assassination of Anwar Sadat and still active today, the Emergency Law essentially reemphasizes preexisting restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly and provides for a broader range of police activity. A copy of it can be found here (and one of the Constitution here). Many have called for its repeal since its activation in the '80s, though nothing has happened or is likely to happen in the near future. It is incredibly easy to focus in on the Emergency Law as the source of many of Egypt's problems. But what worries me about such activities is their tendency to idealize the pre-1981 status of Egyptian political culture. While Sadat moderately liberalized society during his reign, Egypt was by no means a competitive democracy. It was a one-party state in which just as much legislature was passed via the executive, where the courts were just as dependent on the executive for authority, and in which political crackdowns were just as likely to occur. Focusing on the Emergency Law ignores the crucial issues that exist within Egyptian legal culture and absolutely must be fixed. Much of what the Emergency Law allows for is already on the books, and it will take far, far more than winning a parliamentary election and somehow miraculously repealing the Emergency Law to fix Egyptian government.

For a really, really solid primer on the 2010 elections, 2011 presidential election, and background on Egyptian government, I strongly encourage you all to check out the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's briefing on the elections. It's a quick and dirty read that will leave you pretty fluent in Egyptian political culture upon reading it.

I'm entering midterms, so this may be my last post for a little while, though I'll hopefully have a lot more to blog about next week when folks from AU start visiting. I haven't explored anywhere near as much of Cairo as I would like to, and I'll have a great excuse to go out when I have people to show around. So expect a lot more travel blog-esque posts in the near future instead of all of this heavy stuff :)