Page 1 of
2 A day in the sun for Arab
democracy By Sami Moubayed
DAMASCUS -
There are five serious candidates among 13 choices
for Egypt's 50 million eligible voters in the
presidential election that is spread over
Wednesday and Thursday, with analysts saying that
voting results remain impossible to predict.
Official results will be announced on May
29, when it is expected no one candidate will have
gained a sufficient majority. A runoff is
therefore expected, with the two candidates with
the highest number of votes facing off next month
on June 16-17.
This is a far cry from the
days of Hosni Mubarak - thrown out of power in
February 2011 after massive the protests - when
his re-election was a formality after he came to
power in October 1981; he often "won" 99.9% of the
vote. The main characters in the current polls
are:
Mohammad Morsi.. He is
the "substitute" yet official candidate
of the Egyptian Muslim
Brotherhood. (The Brotherhood's first-choice
candidate, Khairat al-Shater, was disqualified for
legal reasons.) Opinion polls have Morsi gaining
15% of the vote. The United States-trained
politician (aged 60) lacks charisma, and is by no
means a gifted orator like many of his colleagues
in the Brotherhood.
Leaders in the
Brotherhood had originally advised against
presenting a candidate for the presidency,
claiming that it was too early for them to take on
parliament and the presidential office
simultaneously. In Egypt's first post-Mubarak
parliamentary polls late last year, Islamist
parties - led by the Brotherhood's Freedom and
Justice Party - captured more than 75% of the
seats in the People's Assembly (the Lower House).
Controlling parliament and the presidency
would be a huge challenge for the Brotherhood, the
leaders claimed, which would eventually break,
rather than empower the party. Others, however,
claim that now is a golden moment for the
Brotherhood to rise from the ashes after decades
of persecution.
They realize, though, that
whoever is going to become president, he will have
a very difficult path ahead, and they don't want
the Brotherhood to pay the price for years of
corruption, dictatorship and inequality.
It would be wiser, the leaders argue, for
them to present a candidate the next time
Egyptians go to the polls, in 2016, rather than
get a Brotherhood president now who would most
likely fail due to the magnitude of problems
awaiting him.
If Morsi does make it to the
presidency, several challenges need to be
addressed, primarily, what to do with the
Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, known as the Camp
David Accords, signed over 30 years ago?
The Brotherhood still views Israel as "an
enemy" and is ideologically, politically and
emotionally attached to resistance groups in
Palestine, like Hamas.
If the Camp David
Accords are unilaterally abolished, or modified,
the United States would surely freeze its annual
US$2.1 billion in military and development aid to
Egypt, which Washington has steadily provided
since 1982.
Although the Brotherhood has
said it would uphold cordial relations with the
US, the group remains staunchly anti-American,
despite the fact that Morsi was educated at the
University of Southern California and that his
children are US citizens.
A Brotherhood
victory would spell out a u-turn for Egypt's
foreign policy, similar to the dramatic changes
undergone by Iran after the 1979 Islamic
Revolution that severed relations with Israel and
the US.
It would, nevertheless fit nicely
with recent Islamic victories in Tunisia, Libya
and Morocco, and would give a tremendous boost to
the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, which has been at
daggers-end with the Ba'athists in Syria since
1964.
For years, Mubarak worked
systematically on tarnishing the Brotherhood's
image, trying to tell the world that they were no
different from al-Qaeda and the Taliban, which is
incorrect. After almost 100 years in the
underground, the Egyptian Brotherhood - like any
serious and ambitious party - wants to try its
hand at the presidency.
Although seculars
are afraid, realists are arguing: Let the
Brotherhood win, and automatically the aura that
surrounded them during their long years in the
underground, will vanish. Egyptian citizens will
realize that the Brotherhood cannot end or even
curb corruption. They also cannot provide better
jobs and wages for millions of ambitious young
Egyptians entering the workforce annually. Nor can
they establish a theocracy in Cairo, because
neither the international community nor already
established theocracies like Iran or Saudi Arabia
would allow it.
Realists argue that if the
Brotherhood wins this election, the chances are it
would be seriously challenged, if not defeated, in
Egypt's next parliamentary and presidential races.
Due to the Brotherhood's control of nearly half of
the seats in parliament, the organized structure
of their party, the massive network that its
operates on the streets, and the ample funds at
their disposal, Morsi cannot be eliminated that
easily, regardless of his mediocre personal
attributes.
Despite his 11th-hour entry
into the race, Morsi's campaign rallies have drawn
tens of thousands of supporters from across the
country - unseen in other electoral campaigns.
"Based on the numbers and enthusiasm I've seen at
his campaign events, I wouldn't be surprised if he
won the election in the first round of voting," a
local journalist who has closely followed the
Morsi campaign told Inter Press Service.
Abdul Moneim Abu al-Foutouh.
He is the second strong Islamic candidate, who,
like Morsi, is closely affiliated with political
Islam. Opinion polls have him winning about 15% of
the vote. He, too, is Islamic to the bone, having
been a member of the al-Gamaa al-Islamiya (Islamic
Group), a shadow organization whose name rose to
fame in 1993 when one of its figures was arrested
in the US for masterminding the first attack on
the World Trade Center.
He parted ways
with the group to cement his ties with the
Egyptian Brotherhood, yet broke away just last
year when the Brotherhood said they would not
present a candidate for the presidency. That
contradicted with his presidential ambitions so he
nominated himself, campaigning for Egypt's top job
as a political independent.
The
Brotherhood, furious with his deviance from its
strict hierarchical system, expelled him from its
ranks - and because of that the man became
automatically attractive to young and liberal
Egyptians who greeted him as something of a
"converter".
The fact that he is a former
medical doctor and hospital manager adds to his
"civil" credentials and so does a long career in
opposing the dictatorship of Mubarak.
Others, however, doubt his sincerity in
preaching a modern and liberal state, claiming
that this is nothing but empty election rhetoric.
Although he has pledged to maintain good
relations with the US, he nevertheless stunned
world powers this month in an election debate with
Amr Moussa, the ex-secretary general of the Arab
League, by referring to Israel as "an enemy" that
ought to be fought, rather than appeased or
befriended.
Al-Foutouh is committing the
grave error of trying to appeal to all Egyptians -
except perhaps to the Muslim Brotherhood itself,
which he wants to defeat at the polls.
He
is trying to invest in relations with the
Salafists (who announced their support of him last
April via the al-Nour Party) and he has promising
to uphold Islamic virtues, while also telling
liberals and seculars that he has become "one of
them".
A victory for al-Foutouh would be
problematic for the world order, and certainly the
chances of him being a strong president are slim
because his power base is unorganized and
disunited. The Brotherhood wants to see him
defeated and will work hard at bringing him down.
Despite that, many Egyptians consider him a Muslim
Brotherhood president "in disguise".
When
asked what kind of Islam he would like to see in
Egypt, he has cited Turkey, failing to acknowledge
that Turkey doesn't have Salafis and extremists
with ambitions that know no bounds. He also fails
to realize that Turkey didn't reach its current
democracy overnight, and that the first free
elections took place nearly 60 years ago.
The road to Turkish democracy was long and
tough, and included outrageous meddling from the
military, which launched four coups to hamper the
democratic process.
Support for al-Foutouh
cuts across the political spectrum, but it is thin
and not deep-rooted, based more on admiration for
his attempt at bridging the divide between
Islamists and liberals than his personal
attributes.
He has promised to appoint a
young vice president if he makes it to the
presidency, one who hails from the revolutionary
youth that toppled Mubarak. He has also promised
to fill 50% of top jobs in Egypt with young men
and women aged below 45.
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