Election Day: 'Finally, Egypt is born'
From Ben Wedeman and Richard
Allen Greene, CNN
May 23, 2012 -- Updated 2031 GMT
(0431 HKT)
Cairo (CNN) -- One of the world's oldest civilizations took a major
step toward democracy Wednesday as polls closed in Egypt's historic vote for
president, even as many worried the armed forces would quash the results if the
top brass doesn't like the country's choice.
It is the first time the country has
had a presidential election where no one knows what the result will be before
the ballots are cast.
"Finally, Egypt is born,"
one weeping 80-year-old man told Rep. David Dreier, a California Republican who
is in Cairo as an election observer.
Grandmother Nadia Fahmy, 70, was so
determined to be the first one to vote at her polling station that she camped
out in a plastic chair for 2½ hours before it opened.
"I am here to vote for the
first time in my life," said Fahmy. "I want to see a new generation
for my country. I want everything to change."
Other people told CNN they had
waited up to four hours to vote as an atmosphere of enthusiasm swept polling
stations in the capital.
The voting is a monumental
achievement for those who worked to topple longtime President Hosni Mubarak in
one of the seminal developments of the Arab Spring more than a year ago. And it
could reverberate far beyond the country's borders, since Egypt is in many ways
the center of gravity of the Arab world.
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| Egyptian Woman |
"Egypt has always set trends in
the Arab world and for Arab political thought. Trends spread through the Arab
world and eventually affect even non-Arab, Muslim-majority countries,"
said Maajid Nawaz, the chairman of Quilliam, a London-based think tank.
Egypt's election "bodes well
for the rest of the Arab world and particularly those countries that have had
uprisings," said Nawaz, a former Islamist who was imprisoned in Egypt for
four years for banned political activism.
There are 13 candidates on the
ballot, although two withdrew from the race after ballots were printed. If no
candidate gets a majority of the vote in the first round, a second round will
be held June 16-17.
Results of the first round are not expected before the weekend.
Some 30,000 volunteers have fanned
out to make sure the voting is fair, said organizers with the April 6 youth
movement, which has long campaigned for greater democracy and rule of law in
Egypt.
They reported only minor violations
Wednesday, mostly supporters of one candidate or another trying to influence
voters at polling stations.
There is a pervasive fear that the
powerful military, which has run the country since the fall of Mubarak, could
try to hijack the election.
The concern persists despite the
insistence of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces that it will hand over
power to an elected civilian government. The military put armored personnel
carriers on the streets with loudspeakers broadcasting a message that they will
relinquish power, but that did not convince doubters.
Nawaz, the analyst in London, said
Egypt probably is not heading toward a simple case of the military either
giving up control or rejecting the results of the election.
Instead, he anticipated, there will
be an "unhappy settlement" where the military remains "ever-present,
in the shadows," influencing the civilian government without controlling
it.
"Egypt is going along similar
lines to Turkey or Pakistan," he said, naming two other countries that
have formal democracies in place but where a powerful military can affect
events.
The degree to which the military
continues to exercise control in Egypt will depend on who wins the election,
Nawaz anticipated -- but he laughed aloud when asked to predict who that would
be.
Whoever wins the election, Nawaz
said, will face tremendous challenges, even without worries about the army.
"They are inheriting a failed
economy, an abysmal bureaucracy, a frustrated people, and a deep distrust on
behalf of the people towards their military and any policing," Nawaz said.
And Egypt has an elaborate political
mosaic where alliances shift quickly, he added.
Secular democrats oppose military
rule, for example, but if an Islamist candidate wins the presidency, "Some
of the democrats would switch because they would rather have military rule than
the Islamists," Nawaz said.
"It's far more complicated than
'Islamists vs. liberal democracy.' It's rich vs. poor, (hardline) Salafists vs.
the (more moderate) Muslim Brotherhood, secularists vs. Islamists," he
said.
On top of that, the country does not
yet have a new constitution defining the powers of the president or the
parliament, after a court last month suspended the committee charged with
writing it. The court ruled that the members of the committee did not reflect
the national population well enough.
Among the candidates vying for the
presidency are Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and
Justice Party; Amre Moussa, who served as foreign minister under
Mubarak and headed the Arab League; Abdelmonen Abol Fotoh, a moderate Islamist running as a respected
independent; Ahmed Shafik, who was Mubarak's last prime minister;
and Hamdeen Sabahy, a leftist dark-horse contender.
Shafik was mobbed by opponents who
threw things at him when he went to vote Wednesday, his spokesman, Ahmed
Serhan, told CNN.
"People chanted against him
upon his entrance to cast his vote," Serhan said. That prompted soldiers
guarding the polling station to shut the doors while Shafik voted, he said.
"On his way out, some people
threw their shoes and rocks at him while he rushed into the car," Serhan
said. "He is not hurt, and this attack is not representative of how
Egyptian people feel about him."
Many Egyptians seem uncertain of
their loyalties to any particular candidate, and even the weakest of arguments
or the strangest of rumors can shift public opinion overnight.
The vote comes nearly 16 months
after the popular uprising that brought down Mubarak in February 2011. Mubarak
was tried on charges of ordering police to shoot protesters during the uprising
against him, and of corruption.
He is awaiting the court's verdict
and could potentially face the death penalty.
Despite the high-profile trial of
the man who ruled the country for 30 years, popular distrust and anger,
particularly against the military's power in Egyptian governmental affairs,
still inspire protests, some of which have been marked by deadly clashes.
Protesters are upset at what they
see as the slow pace of reform since Mubarak's ouster. Some are also concerned
that the country's military leadership is delaying the transition to civilian
rule.
In January, two Islamist parties won
about 70% of the seats in the lower house of parliament in the first elections
for an elected governing body in the post-Mubarak era.
The Freedom and Justice Party won
235 seats and the conservative Al Nour party gained 121 seats in the People's
Assembly, according to final results. The assembly consists of 498 elected
members, and the rest of the seats were divided among other parties.
CNN's Salma Abdelaziz and Hala
Gorani and journalists Ian Lee and Mohamed Fadel Fahmy contributed to this
report from Cairo. Richard Allen Greene reported from London.
By Fareed Zakaria
If you look at Egypt moving forward,
there's a great deal of emphasis placed on the various political parties and
what they may stand for and what they're going to do. But we have to remember:
The real obstacle to democracy in Egypt continues to be the people who run
Egypt — a military dictatorship.
The military is still in power and
they still dominate the economy — there are some estimates that they control
between 10 and maybe even 30% of the economy. No one knows because it's all
secret. But the point is unless the Egyptian military is genuinely willing to
cede power, it doesn't really matter that much who wins the presidential election this
week.
If you look at the Supreme Council
of Armed Forces and the way in which it has controlled the press (punishing
people who write exposés, for example) it's a very disturbing sign. And it
shows you how important it will be not just to have elections in Egypt, but to
have the other parts of a liberal democracy: the guarantees and rights of
freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of association. Let's not
forget — these are the inner stuffings of democracy.
The most important aspect of
Egyptian democracy-building will not be the elections. It will be the writing
of the constitution and making sure there are guarantees for women, for
minorities, for free speech and for free assembly.
For now, political Islam has an
enormous hold over the populace. The reason you didn't see that for the last
few decades was because Egypt was a military dictatorship and it didn't really
matter what the people of Egypt felt.
But over time, I think that
religiosity will be moderated, as it has in almost every Muslim country that
has turned to democracy. Because given time, people realize: they really want
good government, they want jobs, they want economic welfare, and the mullahs
aren't always able to deliver those things. It doesn't matter so much what you
preach about in abstract matters, what matters is governance.
Democracy in Egypt would be an
earthquake in the Arab world — if it succeeds. And the reason is that Egypt is
the heart and soul of the Arab world. Egypt is the place from which all culture
emanates in the Arab world: the songs and music, the TV shows, the language in
many ways.
Egypt is the birthplace of the two
biggest political ideas of the modern Arab world. The first being Arab
nationalism or Pan-Arabism, the idea of politically unifying Arab countries;
and the second being Islamic fundamentalism and this whole idea of political
Islam which came from the Muslim Brotherhood and Sayyid Qutb.
These were Egyptian ideas which then spread throughout the Arab and then the
Islamic world.
So if the next big idea to spring
out of Egypt is a working Muslim democratic system, that would be seismic.
Does the idealism from the height of
the revolution still exist? What will be the greatest challenge for Egypt's new
president? Watch the video for more on the Egypt presidential election.
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