Egypt: Between Sharia Law And Anarchy

Results of the first stage of Egyptian parliamentary elections are due to be announced on Friday. Exit polls suggest that the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood have attracted some 40 per cent of the votes.

The result of this week’s voting was to be announced on Wednesday, but the Central Election Commission delayed it twice. First it said the ballots of Egyptians living abroad had arrived late. Then it maintained it had failed to count all the ballots on time due to an unexpectedly high voter turnout, which is estimated at 70 per cent. The commission warned that the official announcement may be delayed further to Saturday.

However preliminary results expectedly point to the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies as the winners of the election, with some the brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party claiming 40 per cent of the votes.

Salafi party Al-Nur gathered the second-largest support base in the first round of the election. An estimated 20 per cent of ballots have been cast in their favor.

This is certain to create a bad mood among Egyptian secularists. The Muslim Brotherhood is moderately Islamic, and the Salafi have even stricter views on religion. There were fears that the two would form an alliance and turn Egypt into a theocracy, but so far the two political movements have been keeping their distance.

It is the first election held since the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak in February. It is being conducted in three stages. This week, polling was undertaken in nine out of 27 provinces, including Cairo and Alexandria. Future voting will be in rural areas, where Islamists traditionally have stronger support than in the cities, and is bound to increase positions of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis.

Meanwhile, protests are continuing in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, where demonstrators demand that the Supreme Military Council steps down. The protesters believe that the general election will not bring any substantial change as long as the generals, who served Mubarak’s regime, remain in power.

Over the past few weeks there were violent clashes between the demonstrators and security officers. Forty-three people have been killed and a thousand injured in the latest high-profile instances of the ongoing violence. Protesters accuse police of using live ammunition, an internationally-banned kind of tear gas, as well as tactics of brutal intimidation.

Source: https://rt.com/news/egypt-vote-results-islamists-835/