He’d hoped it would be a plebiscite for his military coup that toppled Egypt’s first freely elected president last year. Instead, this week’s presidential election seems to have delivered the former army chief Field Marshall Abdul-Fattah el-Sissi a slap on the face.
Sissi opened his campaign by demanding a “historic turnout.” What he got was 42 percent, almost 10 points lower than the last presidential election, the results of which his coup canceled.
The picture looks grimmer if we take into account the fact that 6 million of those eligible to vote didn’t bother to register.
To assure a high turnout, the military imposed a fine of $75 for non-voting, a hefty sum for most Egyptians.
It also added a third day of voting and made day three a holiday so that more people could get to the polls. To ensure Sissi won big, the military rejected all but one of his putative challengers. The one allowed to be slaughtered is Hamdeen Sabahi, who embraces the same Nasserist ideology as Sissi and his entourage.
Sissi’s camp promised that his election would put Egypt on the path to “true democracy.” What Egyptians got was a return to the old days of military rule, when the army’s candidate always got more than 90 percent of the votes.
As of Thursday, official media credited Sissi with 92-plus percent.
The fiasco may be a moral victory for deposed President Mohammed Morsi, now in prison on charges of espionage and murder, yet it doesn’t mean a win for the Muslim Brotherhood.
The effective boycott of the vote goes beyond the Brotherhood’s traditional base. In the 2012 election, the Brotherhood collected some 5 million votes in the first round. This week, 35 million to 40 million of those eligible to vote abstained.
Along with the Brotherhood, the call for a boycott came from secular and pro-democracy forces, from the April 6 Youth Movement to several unions, professional organizations and human-rights groups Sissi’s failure doesn’t hide the fact that many Egyptians, perhaps even a majority, were unhappy with Morsi and angry at the Brotherhood’s power-grabbing tactics.
The low turnout does show that a majority of the Egyptians who assembled at Tahrir Square to demand Morsi’s dismissal don’t want to return to the bad old days of military dictatorship.
The wisest way to deal with the Brotherhood would have been more democracy, not less. Morsi could have been defeated in another election at the end of his four-year term. But Sissi and his military colleagues seized the opportunity to nip the promise of democracy in the bud.
Now, almost 5,000 have died in clashes between protesters and security forces while over 16,000 others have been imprisoned. Hundreds have been sentenced to death or long prison terms by kangaroo courts.
That Sissi becomes president without a convincing mandate is only one of the challenges Egypt faces. Despite a year of saturation coverage, he remains an unknown quantity. Because the Egyptian military were trained to keep mum on political issues, no one knows what he really thinks.
At the start of the campaign, a TV interviewer asked about his program. “What program?” he darted back in anger. “I have no program!” He explained that he was seeking a personal covenant with “the Egyptian people.”
Sissi’s entourage also tells us little about his political coloring. His chief adviser is 90-year-old journalist Muhammad Hassanein Heikal, once speechwriter for Gamal Abdel-Nasser, who founded the military regime in 1952.
There is also Amr Moussa, an 80-year-old former foreign minister. The two are joined by a number of retired officers, shadowy figures from security services.
The group as a whole could be regarded as mildly anti-American but pragmatic enough to understand that Egypt needs the United States. On that understanding, Sissi tried last month to rebuild bridges to Washington by evoking the possibility of a visit once he’s elected president.
No doubt, America too needs Egypt, but not just any Egypt. Gripped by endless domestic unrest with its economy in melt-down, Egypt would be more of a hindrance than a help for any US strategy in the Middle East.
Washington should half-open the door to Sissi with the promise of full opening if he moves beyond “iron fist” shenanigans, drops his narrative of coming to power on a tide of popular revolution and seeks a national dialogue with the diverse forces, including the Muslim Brotherhood, that compose the new Egyptian political landscape.
In other words, Washington should try to save Sissi from his own demons, in the interest both of the United States and of Egypt.