The Dynamics of Elections Under Mubarak
Mona El-Ghobashy
No one thought parliamentary elections under Husni Mubarak were democratic or even semi-democratic. The elections did not determine who governed. They were not free and fair. They installed a Parliament with no power to check the president. The government National Democratic Party (NDP) always manufactured a whopping majority, never getting less than 70 percent of the seats. The opposition was kept on a tight leash, restrained by police intimidation, rampant fraud and severe limits on outreach to voters. And citizens knew that elections were rigged, with polling places often blocked off by baton-wielding police, so few of them voted.
And yet, both government and opposition took parliamentary elections very seriously, preparing for them months in advance. Out of eight electoral cycles from 1976 to 2010, the opposition boycotted only once, in 1990. “We’ve tried the bitterness of boycotting in 1990, and secured only five seats in the 1995 elections,” said Wafd leader al-Sayyid al-Badawi, explaining his party’s decision to field 250 candidates in 2010.1 The opposition’s choice to participate was not as odd at it might seem, for Egypt’s parliamentary elections, despite their serious limitations, were not mere props or stereotypical autocratic rituals of acclamation. They were rare moments of open, if unequal, political competition between government and opposition. Their strategic interaction meant that elections were far from trivial.
The elections of December 2010, concluded a month before the revolution that began on January 25, 2011, defied expectations—not because the ruling NDP again dominated Parliament, but because of the lengths to which it proved willing to go to engineer its monopoly. 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 run-off.
Reaction to the lopsided results was severe. Egyptian and international observers with no known sympathies for the opposition condemned the conduct and outcome of the polls. 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.”2 US spokesmen expressed “dismay” and “disappointment” at irregularities, in a collective throwing-up of hands that reportedly went to the very top of the State Department. Prominent NDP member Hamdi al-Sayyid, who was ousted from the seat he had held since 1979 by a regime-sponsored “independent,” fumed: “The fraud perpetrated against me was systematic. They deserve a Ph.D. in rigging.”3
The outcome unsettled a widely held belief about the Mubarak regime: that it tolerated a smidgen of parliamentary opposition to disarm domestic and international critics. Indeed, the longevity of Mubarak’s rule was often attributed to an omniscient political manipulation that made clever use of opposition, even creating it at times, but never permitting it to threaten the powers that be. 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. The 2010 contest’s liquidation of all credible parliamentary opposition, both secular and religious, thus raised the question: Why did the government abandon its previous modus operandi? After the revolution broke out, the question became far more pressing, with even NDP insiders quick to blame the unrest on the ham-handed skullduggery at the previous month’s polls.
A common answer has been that Mubarak and his inner circle were consolidating their forces in anticipation of a choreographed transfer of presidential power to the aging president’s son, Gamal. But the NDP’s total (if fleeting) lock on the 2010 Parliament had less to do with securing the presidential transition and more to do with cordoning off the legislature from bottom-up demands for representation. It was not the first time an Egyptian regime had tried this gambit since multiparty legislative elections were restored in 1976. In 1979, the year of the Camp David peace deal with Israel, Anwar al-Sadat increased repression to return an assembly cleansed of credible critics; in 1995, Mubarak did the same thing. In late 2010, the experiences of the outgoing parliament’s session made Egypt’s ruling cartel wary of normalizing a legislative opposition at a time of economic restructuring and widespread ferment in society. Rather than expand representative channels to absorb collective grievances, the regime opted to close off all the outlets. It was not the whim of an unchallenged autocrat that prompted this tactical shift, however, but the persistence and ingenuity of Egyptians in struggling for their rights, both outside formal political institutions and inside them. Indeed, vital as social protest was to weakening Mubarak, his regime was also constrained by the very elections through which it sought to cement its grip on the country.
CURIOUS CONTESTS
As in day-to-day politics, the Mubarak-era elections brought together two wildly mismatched players, one holding all the state’s resources and force and the other possessing nothing more than the sympathy the public may have had for the underdog. There was no uncertainty about the overall winner, but winning was not what was at stake. Since the playing field was not level, anything but a government victory was ruled out, and so all parties used elections as means of achieving extra-electoral ends. For the regime, elections were one among several implements of rule used periodically to re-establish its domination. Campaigns were seasons for the renewal of political alliances and redistribution of economic resources to the regime’s vast pyramid of minions and their respective lower-level clients.
Opposition groups entered elections not to win a majority, and certainly not to govern, but rather to build political standing. They cultivated new and old constituencies, lambasted the government and advertised their own integrity, but also sought seats in Parliament, for to boycott the legislature would have been tantamount to accepting political invisibility. Official status as MPs gave opposition members access to the state bureaucracy overseeing services in their districts, and the standing to meet with foreign delegations. Most Egyptians avoided elections altogether, either because they could be physically dangerous or because there was nothing in it for them. But citizens’ stance toward elections was not fixed, and depended on the nature of their ties to the political contestants in a given cycle: some voters sought basic goods and services they did not get otherwise, while others supported particular candidates for ideological or kinship reasons.
As with many authoritarian projects across time and space, elections in Mubarak’s Egypt became a fulcrum of both rhetorical and material contention over the basics of regime legitimacy and control. Elections showed how in the details of authoritarian laws and statutes lurks the devil of anti-authoritarian mobilization. “Form creates content” (al-shakl yikhlaq madamin) was the refrain among Egypt’s patient anti-authoritarians. These overlapping dynamics were clearest in 2005, Egypt’s “year of elections.” In May, the regime held a referendum on amending Article 76 of the 1971 constitution to allow for direct, multi-candidate presidential elections. Mubarak of course won these elections on September 7, securing a fifth presidential term. Parliamentary elections followed in November–December and they were momentous indeed. Contesting only a third of Parliament’s 444 seats, the Muslim Brothers captured 20 percent, a fivefold increase in their representation. The Brothers’ gains upped the total proportion of opposition deputies in Parliament to 25 percent, the highest since the return of multi-party elections to Egypt in 1976. By contrast, the performance of the NDP was unimpressive. Despite the active support of the vast bureaucracy and security forces, only 145 of the 432 candidates officially fielded by the NDP won, securing 33 percent of the assembly’s seats. The NDP swiftly incorporated 166 “independents,” almost all of whom were party-affiliated but had not received the party’s nomination, enabling it to maintain the all-important two-thirds majority required to pass legislation and approve constitutional amendments.
There was no doubt that the regime would maintain control of the 2005 parliament, but it was done at high cost. Coming at the peak of President George W. Bush’s democracy promotion rhetoric, Egypt’s elections received intense attention from foreign governments, media, and domestic human rights organizations, which zeroed in on the fraud and the violence marring the vote that claimed fourteen lives. Unexpected street battles in hotly contested districts and the final results rang alarm bells for a regime facing a crucial decision: the transfer of presidential power from the incumbent, Husni Mubarak, to a successor yet to be named but presumed to be his son Gamal. Arriving at such a delicate juncture, the election gave off several unwelcome political signals. At the level of political organization, the balloting revealed a well-endowed yet disorganized and unpopular ruling party set against a disciplined and relatively popular Islamist movement. At the level of social mobilization, the election of 121 Islamist and non-Islamist opposition deputies indicated that segments of the population were neither disengaged nor easily bought off, the two postures encouraged by the regime. The Egyptian and international media carefully tracked the trouncing of NDP incumbents by Muslim Brother challengers, district by district, damaging the regime’s reputation for producing effortless landslides greased by copious patronage.
And there were also the nitty-gritty election procedures, which in 2005 were as crucial as the electoral outcomes. The year’s three balloting exercises were all occasions for organized domestic mobilization on the issue of election management and monitoring, with discreet international backing. Mobilization centered not only on voting-day activities but also encompassed critical pre-election procedures such as compiling the voter rolls and ensuring the availability and quality of indelible ink, as well as the all-important issue of the integrity of the ballot count.4 Leading the campaign for a cleaner vote were Egypt’s judges, represented by their elected leadership in the Judges’ Club. Judicial mobilization, abetted by citizen activists, was a key motif of the 2005 electoral year, but it did not begin then. How and why judges orchestrated an uncharacteristically high-profile, media-savvy campaign for full supervision in 2005 is a winding story that begins in the legal documents of Nasserist Egypt.
RULERS, RULES AND RESISTANCE
Judicial supervision of elections has its roots in Law 73/1956, Organizing the Exercise of Political Rights.5 Law 73 codified the Nasserist ethos of popular participation, and as such is best remembered for extending the franchise to women for the first time, lowering the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen and abolishing a host of pre-1952 restrictions on voting and running for office. The law also codified the Nasser-era ambivalence about elections, stipulating judicial supervision while at the same time blunting its subversive potential. The law falls short of granting judges complete jurisdiction over election management, instead dividing that responsibility between judges and other state officials such as the interior minister, provincial security agents, and members of prosecutorial bodies (Articles 16 and 24). In 1971, the law’s provision for judicial supervision of elections attained constitutional status. The September 1971 constitution was the keystone of the fledgling Sadat regime’s new rhetoric of democracy and the rule of law, and constitutionalizing judicial supervision of elections bolstered the ostensible commitment to rule of law. Article 88 of the constitution thus mandates that “voting occur under the supervision of members of a judicial body.” The terse yet pregnant wording created an opening for activists and litigants to exploit the political potential of legal ambiguity. Struggles over the meaning of “supervision” (ishraf) and “judicial body” (hay’a qada’iyya) would take center stage in future elections.
The pivotal, capacious Article 24 of Law 73 granted the interior minister the power to determine the number of principal and auxiliary polling stations. The article also specified that the supervisor of each main polling station be a member of a judicial body, though it did not extend this requirement to auxiliary stations, permitting public-sector clerks and other civil servants to oversee those areas. This detail spawned the only instance of successful opposition coordination in Egyptian elections. On October 20, 1990, all of the major opposition parties, including the Wafd and the Labor Party affiliated with the Muslim Brothers (but not the leftist Tagammu‘), signed a pact to boycott the parliamentary poll in protest at the absence of complete judicial supervision, including auxiliary polling stations.
A disgruntled and resourceful independent candidate, Kamal Hamza al-Nasharti, took the issue a step further. He filed suit after the elections, arguing that Article 24’s assignment of public functionaries to supervise auxiliary polling stations was a violation of the constitution’s Article 88 requiring judicial supervision. Al-Nasharti argued that non-judicial civil servants lacked the requisite impartiality to ensure fair polling procedures. The administrative court reviewing the case agreed with him and referred the case to the Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC), which took ten years to hand down its landmark ruling on July 8, 2000—also siding with al-Nasharti.6 The court ruled that for judicial supervision to be effective, it must extend beyond main stations to include auxiliary ones as well. The government scrambled to amend Article 24, and a decades-long opposition and judicial demand was finally realized: parliamentary elections were conducted in stages over several weeks to enable the comparatively small number of judges (8,000) to supervise thousands of main and auxiliary polling stations.
But the legal wrangling did not end there. The court ruling left a key item unresolved, namely the definition of a “judicial body.” Ever since the 1960s, this vague term had been a persistent node of contention among legal scholars and practitioners, resurfacing during every election as independents and the opposition decried the government’s manipulative electoral practices, most especially the smuggling of non-judicial legal officers into the definition of a “judicial body.” The SCC’s 2000 ruling reignited the debate with a vengeance. Between July, when the SCC ruling was issued, and November, when the parliamentary elections began, debates raged in newspapers and political salons over what and who got included in the definition of a judicial body.
Legal scholars and practitioners, along with opposition candidates and civil society activists, insisted that a judicial body meant only sitting bench judges. Government officials and their legal experts disagreed vociferously, arguing that legal officers in the administrative prosecution and the State Cases Authority (government attorneys) were also legitimate judicial bodies. At issue was a legitimate academic dispute and a pressing matter of regime survival. As legal officers of the executive branch, who answer to the justice minister in ordinary times and to the interior minister at election time, non-judicial legal personnel lacked the potential for autonomous action that bench judges enjoyed and repeatedly demonstrated. By law, they were professionally and organizationally dependent on executive dictates, perfect accessories to lend elections a patina of legality without compromising certainty of outcome. Hence, a seemingly prissy legal definition had obvious political ramifications.
Naturally, the government insisted on its own definition of the term and deployed thousands of its legal officers to supervise polling stations. Still, the 2000 poll was cleaner than previous elections, returning a parliament with a marginal decrease in ruling-party dominance (87.8 percent, down from 90.4 percent in the 1995 parliament) and a relative increase in the representation of Muslim Brothers running as independents (seventeen seats, up from one in the 1995 parliament). A combination of fierce competition between NDP members and more effective electoral supervision led candidates officially nominated by the NDP to secure only 38 percent of parliamentary seats. To avoid an embarrassing repeat during the spring 2002 municipal elections, NDP leaders engineered very limited supervision, leaving 37,410 auxiliary polling stations unmanned by bench judges. Sure enough, opposition parties boycotted and the ruling party secured all the seats.7
The management of the 2000 parliamentary elections had more subtle, though no less significant consequences. Bench judges experienced numerous instances of harassment and obstruction from security agents, and several engaged in verbal and physical confrontations with police as they protested police blockades of roads to polling stations and intimidation of non-NDP voters. Contrary to Law 73’s stipulation that it is the prerogative of the supervising judge at the polling station to determine the station’s periphery, security agents essentially trapped judges inside polling stations while violence and harassment raged outside.8 Bench judges’ negative experiences in 2000, coupled with the unresolved controversy over what constitutes a judicial body, laid the groundwork for the fierce electoral contention of 2005.
“WE SEE YOU”
The 2005 elections merged two parallel judicial struggles: the quest for clean elections and the quest for judicial independence. Egypt’s judges have a long history of struggling for independence from the all-powerful executive branch. Executive–judicial relations got off to a good start at the beginning of Mubarak’s tenure with the passage of Law 35/1984, returning the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) after its abolition by the Nasser regime in 1969. The SJC is a liaison institution between executive and judiciary that each branch naturally seeks to tweak to augment its own power. Judges invoke its historical pedigree as an independent institution of judicial peers who manage judicial appointments and promotions, with an autonomous budget and full control over disciplinary affairs, away from the designs of the Ministry of Justice. The executive, for its part, has always sought influence over the institution by controlling its composition and mandate. The Judges’ Club (established in 1939) was born in this tug of war between the two state branches as a vehicle to aggregate judicial opinion and forward negotiation with the Ministry of Justice.
Executive attempts to control the judiciary began in earnest in the 1990s, with the SJC under the strict control of the Ministry of Justice. By 2005, reformist judges amplified their demands for a new law that would overturn the practice of appointing judges to the SJC by the Ministry of Justice, and replace it with election by judges themselves. The core goal of the judges was an autonomous, elected SJC that would manage the affairs of the judiciary while retaining their Judges’ Club as a separate professional association.9
The government began its legal maneuvering a year before the 2005 elections, moving to shut down the controversy over who gets included in the definition of a judicial body. In a highly publicized request for interpretation, President Mubarak referred the matter to the SCC. On March 7, 2004, the SCC, headed by Mubarak loyalist Mamdouh Mar‘i, returned an opinion that shocked legal experts. Mar‘i argued that government attorneys and administrative prosecutors were indeed part of legitimate judicial bodies and as such could be entrusted with supervising elections. Meanwhile, on March 12, judicial discontent reached fever pitch with an extraordinary general assembly convened to deliberate on an unprecedented intra-judicial incident. Fathi Khalifa, president of the SJC, had issued a written “warning” (tanbih) to senior judge Husam al-Ghiryani for “disparaging the decisions of the SJC.” Judges were affronted by the transparent attempt to silence an esteemed judge, and al-Ghiryani received a prolonged standing ovation. The incident rekindled debate over the purview of the SJC and the stage was set for conflict.
In April 2005, the judges’ first public signal that they would have no truck with fraudulent elections came in a rousing general assembly meeting of the Alexandria Judges’ Club, in which al-Ghiryani and others took the podium to assert that they would stand firm against falsifying voters’ will. A month later in Cairo, on May 13, thousands of judges from all over Egypt met in an extraordinary general assembly to specify their conditions for clean elections ahead of the May 25 referendum on amending Article 76 of the constitution.
On referendum day, the violence against protesters of the Kifaya (Enough) movement captured international headlines, but the government insisted on the orderliness of polling in the rest of the country and claimed a turnout of 54 percent. The day’s events led to weekly protests on Wednesdays by Kifaya and its supporters that lasted throughout the summer, drawing much media attention and varying levels of popular participation. What was soon dubbed “Black Wednesday” by the opposition spawned two additional instances of election-related mobilization. English teacher Ghada Shahbandar founded a cyber-savvy, independent citizen monitoring group called Shayfeenkom (We See You) to oversee the autumn presidential and parliamentary poll. Then, in July, the Judges’ Club issued a report based on its fact-finding mission on conduct of the referendum, the first report of its kind. The nine-page document challenged government turnout figures and claims of full judicial supervision, finding that auxiliary polling stations were still manned by government clerks and that real turnout ranged from 3 to 5 percent. The report included testimonials by some judges and legal officers who admitted to faulty procedures.10
Amending the constitution to allow for direct multi-candidate presidential elections was the centerpiece of the Mubarak government’s political strategy in 2005, though no one in Egypt or abroad expected a real contest. The surprises lay elsewhere: in Ghad Party president Ayman Nour’s garnering of second place with 7 percent of the vote, and the enormous fuss raised over the election management body. While the state-owned press reveled in the simple citizens who expressed gratitude and delight with President Mubarak by filing applications for presidential candidacy (including one woman), domestic monitoring groups and the opposition pored over the details of election procedure. Law 174/2005 on presidential elections established a Presidential Election Commission (PEC) headed by the selfsame Mamdouh Mar‘i, four judges and five “public figures known for their impartiality,” to be chosen by both houses of Parliament. Critics charged that not only was the inclusion of “public figures” a transparent move to pack the PEC with government loyalists, but that the PEC’s absolute immunity from any form of oversight by any institution (Article 12) violated the constitutional right of litigation (Article 68).
Two highly controversial actions by chairman Mar‘i galvanized public mistrust of what came to be called the “imperial” PEC. First, Mar‘i inexplicably decided to exclude some 1,700 judges from supervising presidential elections. Then, he made a public statement disregarding the September 6 administrative court ruling allowing civil society groups to monitor the vote. A day later, Mar‘i reversed his decision. That one of Egypt’s three most high-ranking judges would cavalierly dismiss a widely hailed court ruling, and then abruptly backtrack, reinforced suspicions that the PEC was a legal front to dilute full judicial supervision rather than an impartial management body designed to bolster election integrity. As with the May 25 referendum, the Judges’ Club issued a report in November detailing its criticisms of the presidential elections. A report of the International Republican Institute argues that the Club’s report “deserves credit for some of the procedural changes that were made in advance of the parliamentary elections, including the removal of polling stations from police stations, reducing the number of voters assigned to each polling site to facilitate voting, and the use of indelible ink in all polling stations.”11
The parliamentary elections from November 9 to December 7 saw unceasing action by judges and monitoring groups to ensure a clean vote, especially during the second and third phases when violence by NDP supporters and security forces against opposition candidates and voters led to eleven deaths. The leadership of the Judges’ Club consistently communicated its concerns to Minister of Justice Mahmoud Abu al-Layl (head of a new Parliamentary Elections Commission), monitored the situation on the ground in particularly hard-fought districts, and vigilantly invoked proper electoral procedures. One dramatic instance of this came on November 22, when the Judges’ Club issued a widely publicized statement framed as “Egypt Judges Seek Army Protection.”12 In fact, the statement was invoking Article 26 of Law 73/1956, which empowers the head of a polling station to call in police or armed forces to maintain order. The statement surmised that since police “were unable or unwilling to perform their duties, the Judges’ Club calls on the Election Commission to seek aid from the armed forces to secure the conduct of elections.”
But the highest election drama came in districts like Damanhour in Buhayra province, where, despite the judicial efforts at monitoring, the regime pulled its various tricks to fix the results. In Damanhour, security forces barricaded polling stations, helping the government’s candidate to beat the opposition candidate, a Muslim Brother. A legal official who monitored the Damanhour vote, Nuha al-Zayni, published an account describing the forgery of the final tally.13 Together with the Brothers’ unprecedented electoral success, the exposure of such shenanigans called into question the Mubarak regime’s ability to perpetuate its rule at the ballot box.
GEARING UP
Egypt’s power elite thus approached the 2010 parliamentary campaign exceptionally motivated to control the outcome. As soon as the 2005 elections concluded, the regime began a systematic restructuring of the political arena, changing the constitution and electoral laws, weakening the Muslim Brothers, and strengthening the NDP’s party organization. The aim was not simply to crush the Muslim Brothers at the polls, but to do so with finesse, in order to project anew the image of effortless government control that was so besmirched in 2005.
Three alterations in electoral procedures further skewed the playing field. First, the regime did away with full judicial supervision of elections, again amending Article 88 of the constitution. The revised text replaced monitoring by judges with oversight by an electoral commission composed of “current and former members of judicial bodies,” an amorphous category allowing the government greater leeway in selecting pliant personnel. The regime’s salesmanship for this maneuver is on display in a WikiLeaks cable summarizing a 2005 meeting between Gamal Mubarak and Elizabeth Cheney, then a State Department official with responsibility for Middle East democracy promotion. The cable says that Mubarak “blamed the low turnout in the presidential election (about 7 million voters or 23 percent) on overzealous judges supervising the September 7 ballot who had, allegedly, refused to allow more than one voter at a time into polling stations, and thereby diminished turnout.” The amended Article 88 also stipulated that voting take place on a single day, for the first time since the 1995 elections. Now the opposition could not use the first phase to test outreach tactics and gauge voter response, an important signaling mechanism that was a byproduct of judicial supervision.
The second rule change reprised President Anwar al-Sadat’s invocation of state feminism to ornament an authoritarian maneuver. In 1979, Sadat dissolved Parliament to cleanse it of vehement opposition to his foreign policy, and called early elections under new rules that introduced thirty seats reserved for women. The SCC struck down the women’s quota in 1986. In 2009, Gamal Mubarak’s Policies Secretariat passed through Parliament a law adding sixty-four new parliamentary seats reserved for women. The set-aside is due to expire after the 2010 and 2015 election cycles. NDP spokesmen billed the measure as the empowerment of women to enter national politics, but the opposition called it an increase in seats for the NDP in the guise of women’s rights.
The third rule change built in a safeguard in case the above adjustments failed to thwart Islamist gains. A little-noted but significant item in the raft of constitutional amendments passed in 2007 gave the president the power to dissolve Parliament without a referendum, a right he did not have before.14 Should the 2010 Parliament become unruly, Mubarak could simply shut it down. At the same time that it fixed the electoral framework, the regime siphoned off the material and symbolic resources that sustained the Muslim Brothers. First, in 2007 the authorities arrested and referred to a military tribunal several leaders of the organization, most important among them Khayrat al-Shatir, a key financier and strategist. Other Brother-owned businesses were closed and their assets frozen, on charges of money laundering and attempting to revive the Brothers’ 1940s-era military wing. The Brothers’ candidates in student union elections on university campuses were also targeted, with police using the same violence against voters that they had previously reserved for national elections. Next, the 2007 constitutional amendments banned political parties based on “any religious frame of reference,” to short-circuit attempts by the Brothers to form a political party. In 2008, municipal elections that the Muslim Brothers tried to contest were summarily fixed, sealed, and delivered to the NDP, without a single place allowed the Brothers out of 52,000 seats.
The regime was also keen to ruin the Brothers’ reputation for competence and clean hands. To tarnish the Brothers in the popular imagination, state television used the peak viewing season of Ramadan to air a slickly produced miniseries about the Brothers in their founding years. Written by leading screenwriter Wahid Hamid and featuring a star-studded ensemble cast, the serial faithfully related the tale the government has always told about the Muslim Brothers: they are a shifty, secretive, violent, opportunistic cult that is poised to take over Egypt. And to create mistrust of the Brothers’ strong suit, the government targeted six of their parliamentary deputies for involvement in alleged corruption. The six were among fourteen legislators, including six from the NDP and two from the Wafd, accused of diverting for personal use state-funded medical treatment reserved for constituents.
The regime gamed the system and undermined its main competitor, but it also turned inward, restructuring its main election vehicle to make it a leaner, more efficient vote-getting machine. Over the past four election cycles, a trend had emerged showing declining performance on the part of the NDP’s official candidates: 58.8 percent of these candidates won in 1990, compared to 52.6 percent in 1995, 38.9 percent in 2000, and 32.8 percent in 2005. A corollary was the fierce intramural competition between official and unofficial NDP candidates—the “independents.” Aware of an image problem, especially relative to the Muslim Brothers’ discipline, the NDP’s new leaders moved to erase the party’s reputation as a menagerie of self-seekers who compete against one another and split the party vote.
Ahmad ‘Izz, a steel magnate and an associate of Gamal Mubarak in the Policies Secretariat, shoved aside NDP election kingpin Kamal al-Shazli to promulgate his own strict rules for candidacy, marketing the new procedures as the “institutionalization” of the NDP. As before, aspiring candidates had to pay a nonrefundable, minimum application fee of £E 10,000 (around $1,750), but now they also had to sign affidavits vowing not to run as independents if they were not selected to front the NDP. As insurance, ‘Izz and Co. instructed the Ministry of Interior to issue only one copy of a candidate’s criminal record, which is required of anyone who wishes to declare electoral candidacy. Since the sole copy of this record was to be submitted to the NDP, jilted would-be candidates were not able to reapply as independents.
“RIGGING WITH A HINT OF ELECTIONS”
The meaning of ending judicial supervision was immediately made clear on election day. If the iconic image from the 2005 elections showed elderly female voters climbing makeshift ladders to enter polling stations blocked off by police but staffed by judges, the defining image from 2010 was a surreptitiously shot four-minute video of a voter-free polling station in the Bilbays district of the Delta province of Sharqiyya. Two poll workers calmly filled out ballot after ballot, stacks of which were then carried off by other civil servants to be stuffed in boxes off camera.15 As Muhammad Badi‘, leader of the Muslim Brothers, quipped, “These were not elections with rigging; it was rather rigging with a hint of elections.”16
By the early afternoon of November 28, the day of first-round voting, and in defiance of the Higher Election Commission’s strict ban on cameras inside polling stations, hundreds of videos were being posted on YouTube and Facebook capturing the fraud-producing methods of yore. The clips are a valuable documentary record; it turns out that the ballot stuffing of Bilbays was ubiquitous. Videos also picture clusters of NDP voters huddled over ballot boxes, collectively filling out ballots while uniformed police look on; opposition candidates and their representatives heatedly arguing with polling station heads who refused them entry, citing eleventh-hour rule changes; opposition voters assembled in front of closed-off polling and counting stations, chanting slogans against the cheating; and incensed citizens storming polling stations and hurling stuffed ballot boxes out the windows.
The most widely discussed incident of fraud involved Judge Walid al-Shafi‘i, who went to the press with his election-day experience. Al-Shafi‘i was assigned to the Badrashin district in the October 6 province outside Cairo as one of the drastically reduced corps of jurists overseeing the polls. On the afternoon of the voting, he made his way to an auxiliary polling station to investigate reports that it was blocked off to voters. As soon as he arrived at the station, he was detained and his ID card confiscated by Ahmad Mabrouk, head of the Badrashin State Security Investigations Department, who barked at him, “You step aside.” While in police custody, al-Shafi‘i saw no voters at the station but did see poll workers sitting at desks in a classroom filling out empty ballots. A hapless worker came up to him with a pile of completed cards, saying, “I’m finished, sir.”17
Why did the Mubarak regime abandon what was thought to be its trademark asset, namely the calibration of election rigging to let in some legislative opposition, polish its image, and thereby stabilize its hold on power? The oft-made claim that the regime needed total control of Parliament to stage-manage the scheduled 2011 presidential election is unconvincing. Even with a quarter of the seats, a parliamentary opposition could not field a contender for executive office. The rules laid out in the amended Article 76 in Egypt’s constitution were expressly designed to block the presidential candidacy of anyone outside the regime.18
Both NDP members and their critics attributed the 2010 election outcome to the party’s new guard, headed by Assistant Secretary-General Gamal Mubarak and his right-hand man, Ahmad ‘Izz. Regime apologists deployed the rhetoric of superior organization and dogged constituency service to portray the government party’s dominance as a “sweeping win.” As the NDP court intellectual, Abdel Moneim Said, insisted: “The NDP had begun to prepare for this campaign five years ago, applying a minutely calibrated scientific approach that involved thorough studies of all the electoral constituencies.”19 Opposition writers agreed that the election was the handiwork of the NDP’s junior elite but gave them a negative cast, depicting Gamal Mubarak and ‘Izz as political neophytes with a zero-sum view of politics.20 Writing on the BBC website, the novelist Alaa al-Aswany drew a nostalgic contrast with the grizzled old guard represented by Kamal al-Shazli, the consummate horse trader whose death shortly before the elections symbolized the complete takeover of the NDP by the crony capitalists surrounding the younger Mubarak.
A focus on the crew of NDP forty-somethings who steered the Egyptian ship of state before the 2011 revolution should not obscure the deeper social dynamics that drove their calculations. As the new guard commandeered public assets for delivery into private hands, Parliament moved to center stage as the site where the legal framework for the transfer was to be hammered out. As with any exclusive club, membership of Parliament allowed entry into new networks of privilege created by the economic shift, but it also enabled access to information about economic rearrangements that was routinely hidden from public view. NDP hangers-on sought Parliament for the profits, while the opposition sought Parliament for knowledge and proximity to the bureaucracy controlling public services. Because of its visible size, at 121 deputies, and its representation of normally excluded interests, the combined opposition in the 2005 parliament was able to clamor for the information and services that the NDP wanted to reserve for itself. So as to forestall a reprise, the regime decided to shutter Parliament as a place to do politics, reallocating the opposition’s valuable seats to a wider net of NDP dependents.
UNDER THE ROTUNDA
Egypt’s opposition parliamentarians had no illusions about their clout under the rotunda. The NDP’s overwhelming majority drowned out even their loud voices in debates over legislation, and parliamentary rules prevented them from blocking government policies. So they ramped up their problem-solving and monitoring functions instead, channeling goods and services from the bureaucracy to their constituents, and activating mothballed legislative oversight instruments to funnel information to the public about controversial bills and policies.
One of the most intense confrontations between government and opposition inside the chamber concerned the state budget. In the March 30, 2010 plenary session to vote on the budget, ninety-eight Brotherhood and secular opposition deputies tabled a written protest accusing the government of manipulating revenue figures. Budget Committee Chairman ‘Izz angrily pounded on the podium and shook his fist at fellow committee member and Muslim Brother MP Ashraf Badr al-Din, spluttering: “I know more than you do! This is just an attempt by the ignorant to instill public doubt in the state budget!”21 Not surprisingly, in an extended rationalization of the NDP’s “victory” after the elections, ‘Izz targeted the Brothers’ parliamentary performance. “The overall attitude of MB representatives over the past five years was to reject every single draft of legislation and every article—and every paragraph in every article—of draft law, for no logical reason,” he wrote in the quasi-official al-Ahram newspaper. “Our MPs debated, amended, and passed legislation allowing the private sector to participate in infrastructure projects so our country can reduce budget spending, but none of them agreed.”
When their views were rendered moot inside the chamber, opposition deputies simply took them to the sidewalk outside. Bearing signs and wearing sashes emblazoned with slogans over their suits, the protesting opposition parliamentarians were a novel sight for eager news photographers. The deputies staged walkouts on a host of domestic and foreign policy matters, including the Israeli bombing of Lebanon in 2006, the wholesale constitutional amendments of 2007, President George W. Bush’s visit to Egypt and the exclusion of opposition candidates from municipal elections in 2008, the renewals of emergency law in 2006 and 2008, and the undemocratic amendments to the law on the exercise of political rights in 2010. They joined forces with the extra-parliamentary opposition, participating in the May Day protest demanding an increase in the national minimum wage and sitting cross-legged on the ground with the protesters who camped outside Parliament during the spring of 2010, listening to their grievances and attempting to broker negotiations with government officials. The parliamentary opposition represented a much wider social base than the Mubarak regime was prepared to deal with in an official institution.
Everyone knew that elections under Mubarak were fraudulent affairs, a combination of violence and vote-rigging. The significance of the elections was not their outcome, but the way in which Egypt’s judges, dissident parliamentarians, and social movements turned them into arenas of intense struggle for greater representation.