Voters’ Apathy Influences Egypt’s Legislative Election

Egypt’s first parliamentary election since the 2013 ouster of an Islamist president and the election a year later of the general who removed him began Sunday, with the outcome likely to be a compliant legislature that will back, rather than challenge, the policies of President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi.
Voters’ Apathy Influences Egypt’s Legislative Election
An Egyptian casts her vote during the first round of Egyptian parliamentary elections, at a polling station in Alexandria, Egypt, Sunday, Oct. 18, 2015. AP Photo/Hassan Ammar
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CAIRO—A mix of voter apathy and frustration characterized elections held Sunday for Egypt’s first legislature in more than three years, a chamber widely expected to be compliant with the policies of President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi who, as military chief, ousted the country’s first freely elected leader before he was elected to office himself a year later.

Egypt’s last Parliament, elected less than a year after the 2011 ouster of longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak, was dominated by supporters of the now-outlawed Muslim Brotherhood as well as ultraconservative Salafi Islamists. It was dissolved in June 2012 following a ruling by the nation’s highest court that its election was unconstitutional.

A largely toothless upper chamber, also dominated by Islamists, continued to sit until el-Sissi’s July 2013 ouster of the Islamist Mohammed Morsi, when it was also dissolved.

“There’s no incentive to vote,” declared 38-year-old Mohammed Mahmoud, owner of a carpentry workshop across the street from a polling center in Boulaq el-Dakrour, one of the most densely populated districts in Egypt.

“Even if a candidate has a platform, I don’t think it’s true. I don’t think it will be implemented. It will be just talk,” he said in Cairo’s twin city of Giza, located in 1 of 14 provinces in which the first of two days of voting took place Sunday.

One of his workers, Mohammed Hassan, echoed the same sentiments, “We’ve been hearing the same things for 20 years.”

Egyptians women wait to cast their votes in the Egyptian parliamentary elections outside a polling station in Alexandria, Egypt, Sunday, Oct. 18, 2015. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
Egyptians women wait to cast their votes in the Egyptian parliamentary elections outside a polling station in Alexandria, Egypt, Sunday, Oct. 18, 2015. AP Photo/Hassan Ammar