The dismal showing of the seven lowest-ranking candidates did not dampen their enthusiasm for the process, reports Mustafa El-Menshawy Rifaat El-Agroudi went to the polls to cast his vote last Wednesday. With the media in tow, the Wifaq Al-Watani Party leader and presidential candidate, however, did not find his name on the voters' list. In the end, after discovering that his name had been spelled wrong, El-Agroudi was finally able to add his vote to the 4,105 others nationwide that had chosen him to be the next president. El-Agroudi's dismal showing -- considering the more than seven million voter turnout overall -- was no surprise. What many are wondering, however, is what El-Agroudi and the six other candidates -- who were complete unknowns before the three-week campaign suddenly pushed them into the limelight -- will do now? Will they sink into the same oblivion they were in before? "Other than President Hosni Mubarak, Noaman Gomaa of the Wafd Party, and Ayman Nour of the Ghad Party, the other presidential candidates stand no chance of political survival after the vote," said Gamal Abdel-Gawwad, a political analyst with Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies. Abdel-Gawwad told Al-Ahram Weekly that the government used the seven candidates to paint a picture of multi-candidate elections, but that they would "be of no use to the government now that the elections are over." While Nour and Gomaa secured in the hundreds of thousands of votes each, all of the other seven candidates got less than 56,000 votes combined. Before the elections, the Takaful Party's Osama Shaltout said he expected 51 per cent of voters to support him. In the end, he only secured 29,857 of the seven million votes. Shaltout blamed his party's meagre budget, as well as election day irregularities, for his poor showing. It would be more accurate to say that prior to the free airtime and column inches allocated to all the candidates by the campaign rules, most people had never even heard of any of these seven men -- or their parties -- before the race began. Each candidate was also given LE500,000 by the government to use for campaigning, and will have to present a report to the Central Auditing Agency indicating how the money was spent. Even though the Dustouri Party's Mamdouh Qenawi and the Misr Al-Arabi Party's Wahid El-Oqsuri toured their southern hometowns in an attempt to gather support, El-Oqsuri only got about 11,880 votes and Qenawi some 5,400 in the final tally. Nonetheless, El-Oqsuri said, "coming in fifth is alright for me. I feel like the party -- which had been frozen until 2004 -- was pushed into the limelight." He said membership had gone up from 8,000 before the elections to 9,000 today. El-Agroudi said, "people have a better knowledge of the party and our platform now." Still, the parties clearly lack the popular support base or influence necessary for real impact on the political scene. That does not look set to change, even after all the free publicity generated by the campaign. In fact, it may get even worse, since many of the candidates' platforms came under heavy fire for either being too similar to each other, or else unrealistic, superficial and poorly conceived. Fawzi Ghazal of Misr 2000, for instance, based his platform on making Egypt "one of the world's wealthiest countries" -- a seemingly far- fetched goal at the present time. Another candidate pledged to "rebuild the Egyptian citizen". Other platforms verged on the ridiculous, if not comic. The Umma Party's Ahmed El-Sabahi wanted to bring back the fez as a national form of headgear. El-Sabahi even said he would be voting for Mubarak, whom he called "an unparalleled hero of war and peace." Despite their dismal showing, many of the candidates exhibited the same sort of pre-election optimism about their parties' chances in the upcoming parliamentary polls. "We will field more than 200 candidates," Shaltout said, "now that the party's platform is widely known." Shaltout was proud of the fact that national, regional and international media had interviewed him 26 times during the course of the 19-day campaign. A fringe benefit of his newfound fame, said Shaltout, a university lecturer, was that shop owners now allowed him to buy merchandise on installment plans. Ibrahim Tork said his Al-Ittihadi Party would field some 40 candidates. Turk also said he was planning to run for president again in 2011. He said his Alexandria-based party had received "requests to open branches in four governorates". El-Sabahi, meanwhile, said his Umma Party would field 150 candidates. In the 2000 elections, the party also fielded 150 candidates, but ended up without a single winner.
