Egypt Elections
Buses are a major element in Cairo's transportation.
Courtesy Susan Becker
The pluralization of the party system was accompanied by a
parallel but limited opening up of the electoral system.
Parliamentary elections continued to be held even after the 1952
establishment of an authoritarian system, although they were never
truly competitive and played almost no role in recruitment of the
top elite, which was selected from above. The elections were not
meaningless, however. They were a mechanism by which the regime
coopted into parliament politically acceptable local notables, and
they served as a safety valve for managing the pressures for
participation.
During the period of single-party elections (1957-72),
government controls were tight, and candidates were screened for
political loyalty by the leading Free Officers who dominated the
party. Some choice was permitted among candidates, who normally
were authentic local notables, and the personal prestige and
resources of rival candidates often decided the outcome. In the
1960s, a dual-member constituency system was introduced, in which
one of two seats was reserved for a worker or peasant. As mentioned
earlier, this system was a largely unsuccessful attempt to draw the
lower classes into the electoral process.
Beginning in 1976, Sadat permitted competition among three
proto-parties of the left, center, and right, a major step on the
road to a more open political process; scores of independents were
also allowed to run. The 1979 elections, in which antigovernment
candidates running against the peace treaty with Israel encountered
a wall of government harassment and fraud, represented a step
backward from liberalization.
The 1984 and 1987 elections under Mubarak, however, were the
most open and competitive elections since 1952. There were more
parties, because the New Wafd Party and the NPUP, excluded by
Sadat, were readmitted, and the Muslim Brotherhood was allowed to
run individual candidates under the auspices of an allied secular
party. Because campaigning was freer and more extensive than ever,
it was also clearer to more people that party stands on issues were
important in the elections. But, as if to counter this, the
government's introduction of the 1984 Election Law meant to exclude
smaller parties from parliament: no party that received less than
8 percent of the vote would receive seats, and its votes would be
added to the party achieving a plurality. Moreover, the dual-member
constituency system was replaced with large multimember districts
in which party lists competed. This arrangement diluted the
influence of local notables vis-à-vis the government but also
reduced the regime's ability to coopt them, because many refused to
run for election under these conditions. It also ended the
guarantee of half of the seats for workers and peasants. The low
turnout for elections indicated that many Egyptians were
unconvinced that voting under these conditions made any difference
to political outcomes; although officials announced a 47 percent
1987 turnout, the number of voters was actually closer to 25
percent.
Even under the relatively open multiparty elections, the
government party continued to have the upper hand and never failed
to win a large majority. The government party monopolized the
broadcast media, and the government tried to restrict opposition
attempts to reach the voters. The Ministry of Interior ran the
elections, in which the ballot was not really secret; it mobilized
local headmen on the side of government; and it sometimes resorted
to outright stuffing of ballot boxes. Ruling-party "toughs" and
police often intimidated opposition poll watchers and voters. The
government benefited from the tendency of many voters to support
the government candidate out of deference to authority, hope for
advantage, or realization that the opposition would not be
permitted a majority. Many workers and peasants, economically
dependent on a government job or agricultural services, dared not
antagonize the government.
Because the scope of opposition on issues was so narrow, the
personal prestige and patronage resources of candidates played a
major role in swaying votes, and the government party typically
coopted its candidates from local notables with such resources.
Patronage could range from the distribution of chickens at election
time, to the promise of government jobs or the delivery of roads
and utilities to a village, to the refurbishing of the local
mosque. Voters were also influenced by the prestige of wealth and
profession, the well-known family name that could forge intricate
patterns of family alliances, and the national-level stature that
made one a local "favorite son." Only as the electoral process was
pluralized did ideologies and issues come to play a role, but this
role remained limited; many voters either lacked political
consciousness or were unconvinced of the efficacy of issue voting
in an authoritarian regime. Urban middle- and working-class voters
were most likely to vote on an issue basis, but in the rural areas
most people cast their votes for the notables for whom they worked
or for those who had the government connections best able to do
them favors. Thus, the government could offset the votes of the
more politically conscious with a mass of rural votes delivered on
a clientage basis.
The outcomes of the four multiparty elections reflected a
certain changing balance of power between government and the
opposition and among the competing opposition forces. In the first
multiparty elections of 1976, the government center faction won 280
of 350 seats; the right (soon-to-be Liberal Party) 12; and the left
(soon-to-be NPUP), 4. In addition, there were forty-eight
independents, some of whom emerged as leading opposition figures.
In 1979 Sadat, having repressed the NPUP and the just-formed New
Wafd Party, allowed only one supposedly loyal opposition party, the
Socialist Labor Party, to compete, and the government party (the
NDP) won all but thirty seats. In the 1984 elections, the New Wafd
Party and the Muslim Brotherhood formed a joint ticket. The NDP got
73 percent of the vote and took 390 of 448 seats whereas, the New
Wafd Party-Brotherhood alliance captured 58 seats with 15 percent
of the vote and emerged as the main opposition force. The smaller
parties were excluded from parliament by the 8 percent rule. In
1987 the New Wafd Party ran alone, while the small Liberal and
Socialist Labor parties joined with the Muslim Brotherhood in the
Islamic Alliance. The New Wafd Party won thirty-five seats and the
Islamic Alliance, sixty. Thus, under Mubarak the government
majority remained unchallengeable, but it had declined, and the New
Wafd Party and the Islamic movement had emerged as a significant
opposition presence in parliament. However, the exclusion of the
NPUP from parliament, principally through the 1984 Election Law,
marginalized Egypt's only unambiguously populist voice, the one
force that was free of wealthy patrons or powerful economic
interests and that set forth an alternative noncapitalist economic
program. Parliament remained almost exclusively a preserve of the
bourgeoisie. The 1987 elections marked not only the growing
influence of Islam and the decline of the secular left, but also
the rise of a new Islamic-secular cleavage cutting across class-
based rifts and putting the regime, the NPUP, and the New Wafd
Party on the same side. This cross-cutting tended to mute political
conflict to the advantage of the regime.
Despite their seeming inability to win power, the opposition
parties had a real function as "parties of pressure" in the
dominant party system. They articulated the interests and values of
sectors of the population ignored by the dominant party. They
helped frame the terms of public debate by raising issues that
would otherwise have remained off the public agenda. For opposition
activists, participation offered the chance to espouse ideas, to
shape public opinion, and occasionally even to influence policy
because if they threatened to capture enough support, they might
force the government to alter its course. The Liberal Party helped
advance economic liberalization under Sadat, while the NPUP was a
brake on the reversal of populist policies. The Islamists won
Islamization concessions from the secular regime, whereas the New
Wafd Party helped make partial political liberalization
irreversible.
A party of pressure might also act as an interest group
advocating particular interests in elite circles or promoting the
fortunes of aspirant politicians hoping for cooptation. Mubarak's
more consensual style of rule and regular consultation with
opposition leaders marginally advanced their ability to influence
government policy. For example, in early 1990 Mubarak bowed to an
opposition campaign and removed the unpopular minister of interior,
Zaki Badr. A tacit understanding existed between government and
opposition: the latter knew if it went too far in challenging the
regime, it invited repression, whereas the former knew if it were
too unresponsive or tightened controls too much, it risked
antisystem mobilization.
The primary consequence of the system in the short run was the
stabilization of the regime. The divisions in the opposition
allowed the regime to play them against each other. Secularists
were pitted against Islamists, left against right. The opposition
parties channeled much political activity that might otherwise have
taken a covert, even violent, antiregime direction into more tame,
manageable forms. Opposition elites, in working through the system,
brought their followings into it; a sign of the regime's success
was the incorporation of the three political formations that had
been most independent under Sadat--the New Wafd Party, the Muslim
Brotherhood, and the NPUP--into the system under Mubarak.
In the longer run, the party experiment was deepening the
pluralization of the political arena. That the pluralization begun
under Sadat was real was clear from the persistence of all the
parties then founded. They proved to be more than personalistic or
official factions and either revived some political tradition or
were rooted in an underlying social cleavage or dissent on a major
issue. The rough correspondence between the ideologies of the
parties and their social bases indicated a "blocking out" of the
political arena, moving Egyptian politics beyond a mere competition
of patrons and shillas without social roots. This
pluralization had, however, only begun to seep down to the level of
the mass public, much of which remained politically apathetic or
attached to traditional client networks. The dominant party system
had adapted sufficiently to the level of pluralization in the 1980s
to impart a crucial element of stability to the regime.
Data as of December 1990
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