Egypt to hold parliamentary elections in October

Heba Saleh in Cairo

Egypt will hold a long awaited parliamentary election in October, a move that should mark the completion of the country’s transition to democracy but comes amid mounting criticism of a tough government crackdown on dissent.

For three years, Egypt has been without a parliament and the much-awaited poll has already been postponed once from March after the Constitutional Court criticised the law defining electoral districts. The law has since been amended to make these districts more equitable.

Egyptians abroad will cast their ballot on October 17 while voting in half of the country’s provinces will start on October 18. A second stage will start on November 22.

The new parliament will be elected under a law which favours individual candidates over party lists, and which is thought to favour candidates with wealth and family connections — a throwback to Mubarak-era politics ensuring that regime loyalists dominated elected assemblies.

In the absence of parliament, dozens of laws have been passed by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who as army chief in 2013 ousted Mohamed Morsi, his elected Islamist predecessor, in a coup that had significant popular backing amid a sharply polarised political scene.

Since then the authorities have conducted a harsh campaign against Mr Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood group with more than a thousand of its members killed and many thousands detained.

The group was declared a terrorist organisation in 2013 and its political party has been banned. Until then, it had led in every election held since the 2011 revolution which ended the 30-year autocratic rule of Hosni Mubarak.

Mr Morsi and other Brotherhood leaders are now appealing against dozens of deaths sentences handed down by the courts.

The government crackdown has also extended to secular activists who defied protest laws that restrict public demonstrations.

Cairo has consistently brushed off condemnations from human rights organisations and occasional critical statements from western governments as infringements of its sovereignty.

An Egyptian judge presiding over the retrial of three Al Jazeera journalists has sentenced them to three years in prison for propagating false news damaging to the interests of the country and for broadcasting without permission for an unauthorised channel.

In a war-torn region where extremists, including the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, known as Isis, have been able to expand and hold territory, Egypt’s authorities have garnered international backing as a bulwark against the kind of chaotic disintegration in countries such as Libya, Syria and Iraq.

Attacks by militants in Egypt, including bombings and hundreds of killings of army and police personnel by a group affiliated to Isis, have been on the rise since 2013.

The main Islamist force taking part in the election is the Nour party, a Salafi grouping that emerged after the 2011 revolution and which allied itself briefly with the Brotherhood in pursuit of what was then its main ambition — the imposition of Islamic law. It backed the ouster of Mr Morsi, at the cost of some of its popular support.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2015.