Protests erupted last night after final results were announced in the country’s first-ever competitive presidential election. The top two candidates in the first round of the race are Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood and Ahmed Shafik, Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister. This is the report that we aired on Democracy Now! today:
The Carter Center was one of three international organizations accredited to witness Egypt’s historic presidential election last week. Its mission was led by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter [Click to read trip report]. Two days before the official election results were announced, Carter held a press conference at the Four Seasons to announce the mission’s preliminary findings.
I had a chance to interview Carter for 10 minutes afterwards to talk about the election, the future role of the military, U.S. aid, the Camp David Accords and more. The interview aired on Democracy Now! today:
On the first day of Egypt’s presidential election, Democracy Now! videographer Hany Massoud and I spent the day visiting polling stations around Cairo. We visited the upper-calss neighborhood Zamalek, the working class informal neighborhood of Imbaba, Shubra - home to the greatest concentration of Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority - and Tahrir Square, the symbolic heart of the Egyptian revolution.
Here is our report that aired on Democracy Now! today:
Today was the first day of the presidential elections in Egypt. I was interviewed on Democracy Now! and spoke about who the leading candidates are and some of the issues at stake:
On the eve of Egypt’s first post-Mubarak presidential election, I have a new piece at The Nation outlining some of the leading candidates and issues in the race:
Egypt is gripped by election fever. A frenetic mix of excitement and anxiety has taken over the country on the eve of its first-ever competitive presidential poll fifteen months after thirty-year autocrat Hosni Mubarak was forced out of office in a popular uprising.
Scuffed campaign posters plaster neighborhoods across the capital, clinging to everything from walls to lamp posts to car windows. The leading candidates—their expressions alternating between smiling to solemn—stare past one another from giant billboards looming over the city bustle below. Campaign ads echo across the airwaves while election news consumes newspaper coverage. Television and radio talk shows host daily discussions and debates.
On the street, conversations about the election spill out from cafes, bus stops and public squares, blending into the cacophony of Cairo traffic. As the date of the poll approaches, the most common question people greet one another with is, “Who will you vote for?”
Major questions remain about the powers of the elected president, the future economic and political role of the military and the legitimacy of the entire transition process itself, yet anticipation for the poll—scheduled for May 23–24—remains high.
Fifty-two million eligible voters will have a chance to select from one of thirteen candidates appearing on the ballot. If no candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote, a likely runoff between the top two contenders is scheduled for the middle of June, with a handover of executive authority from the Supreme Council of Armed Forces to the elected president by the end of the month.
For the first time in Egypt’s history, the winner of the presidential election is not a foregone conclusion.
I have a new piece in The Nation about some of the political issues surrounding the upcoming presidential elections in Egypt:
Egypt’s ever-turbulent political transition has been particularly volatile in the past few weeks, as the country approaches a highly-anticipated presidential election scheduled to begin later this month. A series of deadly street clashes in the run-up to the poll have left at least a dozen people dead, hundreds wounded and hundreds more in detention facing military trials. The violence comes amid a deepening sense of uncertainty and a questioning of legitimacy regarding nearly every aspect of the political process, from the drafting of the constitution to the presidential vote to the terms of the military’s handover of power.
Three candidates are widely viewed as the leading frontrunners: Amr Moussa, who served as Hosni Mubarak’s foreign minister in the 1990s and who is the former Secretary General of the Arab League; Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a liberal Islamist and a former prominent member of the Muslim Brotherhood who left the group last year after defying its now-broken pledge not to field a presidential candidate; and the Brotherhood’s current official candidate, Mohamed Morsi, who head’s the group’s political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party.
The poll is scheduled to take place on May 23 and 24. If no one wins above 50 percent, the top two candidates will enter into a run-off scheduled for June 16 and 17 with a final winner to be announced on June 21.
While excitement is building over the vote, anxiety and confusion are also mounting as the country staggers into the final stages of an erratic transition process overseen by the military that still threatens to come apart.
I have a new OpEd in the Egypt Independent about my uncle, Mohammed Abdel Qoddous. He has been longtime member of the Muslim Brotherhood and a leading dissident in Egypt.
My uncle standing at the new headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood. May 2011.
Having left Egypt when I was 18 years old, and spending most of my adult life in the United States, I would see my uncle briefly on trips home. I would always hear his stories of protesting and being arrested. He would frequently invite his son and nephews to come join him, though we never did. Since returning to Egypt at the beginning of the revolution and working as a journalist here, I have only really begun to understand who my uncle is and his lifelong dedication to speaking out against oppression.
My uncle being arrested by plainclothes policeman at a protest outside the Journalists Syndicate on January 26, 2011.
While our politics can differ widely at times - arguments unfailingly break out at our weekly Friday family lunches - I have a deep respect and love for him and he remains one of the most principled people I have ever known.
My uncle and I at the new headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood. May 2011.
An excerpt of the piece:
On 13 February 2011, two days after Hosni Mubarak was forced out of office, my uncle, Mohammed Abdel Qoddous, walked into the former headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood in downtown Cairo for the first time in 16 years. The office had been raided and sealed shut by security forces in 1995 in one of the regime’s many crackdowns on the outlawed group.
Nothing had moved since. A teacup with a stubbed out cigarette lay on its side atop a newspaper dated from the day of the raid. Wisps of sunlight filtered in through the shuttered window slats. A blanket of dust, layered precariously high after years of painstaking accumulation, trembled and filled the air as he walked from room to room.
“I was born here,” he said with a smile.
My uncle has been a devoted member of the Muslim Brotherhood for the past 36 years. He joined the group in 1976 — the same year he got married — and has spent much of his adult life committed to the group’s view of the world and codes of conduct. His allegiance to the brotherhood forms a part of his religious identity. He was drawn to its legacy of resistance in Egypt and has stood by it through decades of political oppression and systematic persecution.
Click here for a translated version of this article in Arabic
I have a piece from last week up at The Nation magazine about Egypt’s economic situation and the current negotiations surrounding a $3.2 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund:
Egypt is teetering on the edge of an economic crisis. Cast adrift in a deepening political quagmire over the past fourteen months, the economy has now reached a critical juncture, as the country faces the pressing challenge of financing a large budget deficit as rapidly dwindling foreign currency reserves threaten to crack apart an already fragile situation.
Yet, more than a year after the launch of a revolution driven in large part by economic grievances, the budgetary and fiscal proposals being considered to secure external financial assistance are geared more towards furthering Mubarak-era policies than to promoting social justice.
The state deficit for the fiscal year that ends in June is expected to exceed 140 billion Egyptian pounds ($24 billion), or 8.7 percent of expected economic output, according to the Finance Ministry. Meanwhile, the central bank’s foreign reserves have been shrinking by roughly $2 billion every month, precipitated by a sharp decline in tourism and foreign direct investment since the revolution began.
Over the past year, the government has used up more than $20 billion to prop up the local currency. In February, foreign reserves stood at $15.7 billion, enough for just three months of imports, and with it, the looming prospect of devaluation.
My latest OpEd for the Egypt Independent focusses on the issue of justice in post-Mubarak Egypt and looks at a series of court rulings over the past few weeks, including the case of Samira Ibrahim, who was one of seven women subjected to a so-called “virginity test” after she was arrested in an army crackdown on Tahrir Square on March 9, 2011:
Military prosecutors investigating Ibrahim’s case brought only one individual, Dr. Ahmed Adel, to trial. He stood accused of public indecency and disobeying military orders after an initial charge of sexual assault was dropped. The military tribunal acquitted Adel after the judge found contradictions in witness statements, noting that Ibrahim and another woman gave different names for a prison guard, a discrepancy human rights lawyers said was minor and should not have jeopardized her case. The verdict cannot be appealed.
The military court went further and denied the “virginity tests” even took place, contradicting the December administrative court ruling and admissions by members of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces to journalists and human rights groups, including Amnesty International.
After the verdict was announced Ibrahim ran weeping out of the courtroom, chanting “down with military rule” before fainting. “Egyptian judges are not fair and impartial, it is my right to go to the International Court of Justice,” she later tweeted.
Ibrahim’s case is just the latest in a series of recent court rulings that reflect the continuation in post-Mubarak Egypt of a broken system that, more often than not, offers impunity for government crimes and punishment for those governed.
As the presidential election season gets under way in Egypt, I have a new piece in Jadaliyya about Farouk Sultan, the head of the Presidential Elections Commission:
Egypt is gearing up for the final stages of a tumultuous transitional period under the rule of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) and preparing to enter a new phase following a scheduled handover of government authority to a newly-elected president at the end of June.
The much-anticipated presidential vote is scheduled to be held on 23 and 24 May to elect Egypt’s first president since Hosni Mubarak was overthrown in a popular uprising one year ago. The man in charge of overseeing the poll is Farouk Sultan, the bespectacled, white-haired chair of the Supreme Constitutional Court and head of the presidential elections committee.
Sultan was appointed by Mubarak to head the Supreme Constitutional Court in 2009 in a move that sparked controversy at the time due to his relatively modest judicial background, a lack of experience in constitutional law and a legal reputation among many as that of a regime loyalist with little independence from the executive.
“After the revolution it was expected that Sultan would be removed right away but he has remained in the same post Mubarak wanted him in,” says Nasser Amin, head of the Arab Center for the Independence of the Judiciary. “He represents a very big danger to the constitutional court and the presidential elections.”
Sharif Abdel Kouddous. Independent journalist. Democracy Now! correspondent. Fellow at The Nation Institute. Based in Cairo.
Nicole Salazar. Photographer, Videographer, Editor. Democracy Now! Multimedia Producer. Based in Cairo.
