This week Egyptians are looking at their Tunisian cousins with some envy. The Tunisians convened a revolutionary council to oversee their transition and organize elections. Nine months later, and the Jasmine Revolution has delivered an orderly election which will produce an assembly to write a new constitution and govern for about a year until a new parliament can be elected. The Tunisians have gone for a system of fully proportional representation and no one party is expected to gain a majority—although An Nahda, the moderate Islamist party, back from exile, is likely to do well. In contrast, Egypt’s parliamentary elections are scheduled to begin in a month, on November 28th. They are not expected to go so smoothly.
The rules under which the Egyptian elections will be conducted are, as one friend of mine in the operational wing of the new Egyptian Social Democratic Party told me, “algorithmically complicated.” (He added, wearily, “I’ve got it all plotted out on Excel spreadsheets.”) The Supreme Council of Armed Forces, which took over the executive when Mubarak fell, has drawn a roadmap of the transition. In potted consultation with academics, and negotiations with dozens of parties, they have arrived at a procedural mashup, overlaying the old electoral law with new regulations. Essentially, they have managed to entangle the old system, already encumbered by bureaucracy, with a network of new compromises.
An attempt to explain the rubric:
- Sixty per cent of seats will be elected via closed party lists on a proportional-representation system. Forty per cent will be elected as individual candidates.
- District lines in the party list races and the individual candidate races are not the same. This mean that each voter will get two ballot papers.
- In the individual candidate races, two candidates will be chosen from each constituency. One of them must be a worker or a farmer. (This is a hangover from the time of Nasser’s socialism/)
- In the individual candidate races, a majority of fifty-one per cent must be achieved by a single candidate. If not, there is a run-off.
- Egypt will not vote together on one day. It has been the tradition to have judges in polling stations as adjudicators and there are not enough judges to cover the whole country. Therefore a third of Egypt will vote on November 28th, another third a month later, and the final vote will not happen until January. The results from each tier of voting are supposed to be kept secret (there is no mechanism for exit polls), but some inference will be able to be made from the run-offs in the individual-candidate races.
- Then the voting for the Upper Council, the Shura, will commence. (A third of these seats are by appointment, not by election—don’t ask.)
In the midst of this mess there continue to be several unknowns: for example, there are no real funding regulations in place for parties yet; a law that would ban former members of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party to run has been mooted and may or may not come into effect; and SCAF has resisted international observers, but may allow some foreign organizations to field “watchers.”
Overall, this system seems to me to do its utmost to disconnect the voter from the consequence of his checked ballot paper.
All the way along, there will be Egypt’s traditional electoral mayhem: thugs, intimidation, cash handouts, ballot stuffing, strong-arm local families, clan and mosque. Most people think there is bound to be violence (there always is), and the obfuscation of lawsuits countering close or convoluted results (there always are). If people don’t understand what they are voting for, and if the results are obscured by irregularities, the Egyptian people will have no sense that they have participated in a free and fair election.
In any case, the mandate of the new parliament will be, as far as I can tell, to do one thing only. To elect, choose, or appoint (the mechanism remains totally unclear) within a given six month period, a hundred member constitutional committee that will then have a further six months to draft a new constitution. The new constitution will then be ratified (or maybe not) by national referendum. Subsequently, presidential elections will be held—perhaps some time in 2013.
Whatever shop-assembly version emerges, the Supreme Council of Armed Forces have made it clear they will retain control over the appointment of the Prime Minister and the cabinet as well as control over the budget. Egyptians will not be voting in a new government. The nasty irony may be that if the crowds in Tahrir Square had accepted Mubarak’s proposal to step down in September, they might have elected a new President by now. (How free those elections would be is another question.) Increasingly it has begun to appear that the Supreme Council of Armed Forces wants to stretch a transition out over the longest possible time frame, affording it, inevitably, greater control.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/wendell-steavenson/2011/10/elections-egypt-tunisia.html#ixzz1bodlFObU
