CAIRO—With presidential elections in Egypt just two weeks away—assuming they happen at all—Egyptian liberals and secularists are finding themselves at odds with the democracy they fought so hard to attain. For those who filled Tahrir Square in the Jan. 25 revolution, saving Egypt’s identity as a secular state may mean having to derail the democratic process where majority rule would give the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) entitlement to govern Egypt.
“What the revolution brought the Egyptian people is the right to choose and the right to elect their leaders. Not only the Muslim Brotherhood, but all Egyptians are unified under this request,” says Dr. Khaled Al-Qazzaz, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party foreign relations spokesperson.
Islamist parties won a landslide victory in parliamentary elections in January, taking 72 percent of the seats, split two-thirds for the MB and one-third for the Islamist Salafis. The 100-member Constituent Assembly appointed by Parliament to write Egypt’s new constitution, is likewise dominated by Islamists.
In late March, more than 20 Assembly members including liberals, secularists, and Coptic Christians walked out to protest that it was dominated by Islamists.
We are confronted with a “political monopoly, which the Islamists are pursuing thus undermining prospects for democracy in Egypt and threatening to intensify political instability,” says Mona Makram-Ebeid, one of the constitutional assembly members who walked out. She is also a member of the Advisory Council to the ruling Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF).
In addition to the walkout, several prominent lawyers launched a lawsuit challenging the process of forming the Constituent Assembly on the basis that a parliament appointed assembly violates Egypt’s separation of judicial and executive powers, according to a 1994 Supreme Constitutional Court ruling.
The courts have now frozen the Assembly in light of the lawsuit, putting Egypt in constitutional limbo and making it unlikely that the country will have a new constitution before scheduled presidential elections on May 23 and 24. Since SCAF has stipulated there must be a new constitution before elections, this could delay the vote.
Egypt’s democratic process is thus effectively on ice—a process which would likely give the country an Islamist constitution and a potentially Islamist president in addition to its Islamist dominated Parliament.
The Muslim Brotherhood accuses SCAF and the liberals and secularists of trying to undermine the Freedom and Justice Party, the political arm of the Brotherhood, and push an anti-Islamic agenda.
“The current agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood is to listen to its members, but do what the majority of Egyptians want. It is the elites that are trying to scare people away from the Brothers and instead trying to promote their own agendas and ideologies … due to rejecting Islam,” says Al-Qazzaz.
Banning Through the Box
In a move also seen as an attempt to disrupt the elections, and an Islamist victory, in mid-April Egypt’s Supreme Presidential Electoral Commission (SPEC) banned the top 10 presidential candidates, including the most popular two—the Freedom and Justice Party’s Khairat el-Shater and Salifist candidate Hazem Saleh Abu-Ismail.
The decision, seen as a blatant attempt to prolong military rule, resulted in intensified demonstrations on May 4 in Tahrir Square by all parties.
