Eight and a half months after the ouster of former president Hosni Mubarak, Egyptians are finally readying themselves for national elections. On Monday, the process of registering candidates for both the lower and upper chambers of parliament finished, allowing five more days for legal complaints before the final list is announced early next week. The beginning of polling is scheduled for the end of next month, and will be held over six weeks staggered into three phases, each covering nine out of a total of 27 provinces. The national elections come hot on the heels of a number of union elections, which can be considered as an indicator of things to come, at least as far as the votes of the educated are concerned. Elections were held last month in the largest of the professional unions in Egypt, the General Union of Schoolteachers, comprising one and half million members. Last week, the General Union of Physicians, comprising some 200,000 members, followed suit. As I write this column, elections at the Union of Journalists, a comparatively small but influential organisation, are scheduled to take place tomorrow, Wednesday, while on 25 November, three days before the beginning of the national elections, elections will be held at the General Union of Engineers, which boasts a membership of almost half a million. With the exception of the Union of Journalists, all the unions have not held elections for at least two decades. In both the teachers union and the union of physicians, the list supported by Egypt's largest and best organised force representing Political Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood, garnered some 50 per cent of the votes to the local councils, and more to the national councils, in the case of the national council of the Physicians Union gaining 75 per cent. True, some of the members on this list, including the newly elected chairman of the General Union, were not Brotherhood members, but they owed a great part of their victory to being backed by the organisation. If Brotherhood candidates were able to get so many votes in the elections to the professional unions, then it should follow that they are unlikely to garner less on the national level, especially in the countryside where the pious poor constitute the majority of the population. The question is thus not whether the Brotherhood is the main contender in the upcoming elections, but rather whether it is willing to enter into alliance with other forces, thus conceding part of its share of the vote to political groups ready to contest elections under its umbrella. This has not been an easy process. When electoral alliances were formed a few months ago in anticipation of the elections, the Brotherhood led one of them, the Democratic Alliance, which included some 40 political groupings including the liberal Wafd Party. On the eve of the elections this alliance has disintegrated, leaving only a handful of minor forces allied to the Brotherhood. This is not an altogether bad development, as the last forces to leave the train of the Brotherhood were the more conservative, or radical Islamist forces, the Salafists. The Salafists had hoped that their alliance with the Brotherhood would guarantee them some seats in parliament. But the Brotherhood was unwilling to concede any of its secure seats to newcomers who might rock the boat in constituencies it was contesting. Subhi Saleh, a leading member of the Brotherhood and a former MP, said last week in Alexandria that it was ridiculous to select candidates who until very recently had not believed in parliamentary elections at all in constituencies where other candidates stood a much better chance because of their past experience. Indeed, the Brotherhood has shown itself to be more pragmatic than ideological in the selection of candidates to run on its lists, so much so that some members of the organisation are now claiming that they would be willing to support some of the former MPs of the former ruling National Democratic Party (NDP). The Brotherhood's pragmatism has been apparent since the very beginning of the Egyptian uprising, when it announced it would be contesting only one third of the parliamentary seats, so as not to antagonise the western powers and repeat what happened to the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), or Hamas, when the latter's electoral victory in Gaza led to an embargo by the West. Yet, somehow, this one third has been increasing as the elections have approached, and the Brotherhood has appeared to become more emboldened about its ability to achieve more. First, the group said that in order for it to secure one third of the seats it would have to contest 40-45 per cent of the seats. Now, Issam El-Erian, a leading member of the Brotherhood and deputy-president of the Freedom and Justice Party, its political wing, says that his Party wanted to garner the votes of 25 million citizens, almost have the electorate. He also told members of his Party on Monday that he believed that 65 per cent of the Egyptian electorate was pro-Brotherhood, while the rest were divided between liberals and secularists. As I write, the results of the elections in Tunisia have not yet been officially announced. News of the final count, however, confirms that the Islamist An-Nahda Party has emerged as the country's major powerhouse. One decisive factor in this victory was the large turnout the Tunisian elections witnessed when compared to any previous ones. Likewise, a lot will depend in Egypt on the turnout of the voters in the forthcoming elections, and the results in the first nine provinces where elections will be held on 28 November, which include Egypt's two largest cities of Cairo and Alexandria.
