The next parliament is widely expected to support, rather than challenge, the policies of President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi who is struggling to revive the economy, crush an Islamist insurgency and play an assertive political and military role in a turbulent Middle East. Such a chamber would harken back to the Mubarak-era, when election after election during his 29-year rule were rigged or manipulated to give his National Democratic Party an overwhelming majority in what amounted to rubberstamp legislatures.
Government workers Ahmed Gamal and Ibrahim Yaseen, speaking outside a polling center at Giza’s Pyramids Street, said they were simply voting because they had received time off work.
“People have never elected anyone that did anything for them,” said Yaseen. “The question should not be ‘why are they not voting?’ It should be ‘why should they vote?’”
Ibrahim Eissa, a prominent columnist who supported the 2013 ouster of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi by el-Sissi, then military chief, lamented in an article Monday that little has changed in Egypt since Mubarak’s ouster by the January 2011 uprising, arguing that the “absence of politics” in the public sphere has left el-Sissi in sole charge of just about everything in the country.
The low turnout, he argued, underlined the political apathy among Egyptians.
“We are back to the old, pre-January (2011) scene, when people saw no point in elections, parliament or democracy,” he wrote on the front page of the daily Al-Maqal. “This will take us to where it took the old (Mubarak) regime. Anyone who cannot see that is, without an iota of hesitation, blind.”
