If British colonial officials wary of bumptious nationalists ended Egypt’s “liberal experiment” in 1936, one might say that the Mubarak cabal has halted the illiberal experiment, a second, less substantive venture into partial parliamentary politics. The regime employed the results of the 2005 elections, when the opposition secured an unprecedented 25 percent of parliamentary seats, to signal that continued pressure upon Egypt to democratize would only bring fearsome Islamists to power. Indeed, the longevity of President Husni Mubarak’s rule is often attributed to omniscient political manipulation that makes clever use of opposition, even creating it at times, but never permitting it to threaten the powers that be. The outcome of the elections unsettled a widely held belief about the Egyptian regime: It tolerates a smidgen of parliamentary opposition to disarm domestic and international critics. Prominent National Democratic Party (NDP) member Hamdi al-Sayyid, who was ousted from the seat he had held since 1979, fumed, “The fraud perpetrated against me was systematic. Moderate political analyst ‘Amr al-Shubaki of the establishment al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies called it “the worst election in Egypt’s history.” US spokesmen expressed “dismay” and “disappointment” at irregularities, in a collective throwing up of hands that reportedly goes to the very top of the State Department. While these results are identical to the outcome of the 1995 elections, the reaction this time has been much more severe.Įgyptian and international observers with no known sympathies for the opposition have condemned the conduct and outcome of the polls.
Official and unofficial ruling-party candidates garnered 93.3 percent of the seats in the national assembly, while marginal opposition parties received 3 percent and the Muslim Brothers got a lone seat to be occupied by a member who would not abide by the Brothers’ boycott of the runoff. The Egyptian parliamentary elections that ended on December 5 defied expectations, not because the ruling National Democratic Party again dominates Parliament but because of the lengths to which it proved willing to go to engineer its monopoly.
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