CAIRO: Polls have now closed in the run-off votes for 50 seats in Egypt's new parliament, marked by a much lower turn-out than the initial round a week ago. After the first day of voting on Monday evening, the Freedom and Justice Party, the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, estimated turn-out at 20-25%. Voters commenting on Twitter have said that polling was very slow today, though there have been some reports of increased turn-out in the final hours of polling. There are 56 individual seats in 2-member constituencies to be filled in this first phase of the parliamentary vote. Four were filled after the first round of voting, and the vote in Cairo's northern Sahel district has been annulled by the Supreme Administrative Court, leaving 50 seats to be fought over in the run-offs. The Freedom and Justice Party is in pole position in the run-offs, with its candidates contesting 41 of the 50 seats. FJP candidates hold the lead in 28 of these contests. Candidates from the hardline Salafi Nour party and its allies are contesting 27 of the seats, mostly against FJP candidates. Nour candidates hold the lead in nine contests. The liberal and centre-left parties of the Egyptian Bloc are in the running for 7 of the 50 seats, 6 against the FJP and one against Nour in Port Said. The Bloc's candidates in Port Said and Cairo's Qasr al-Nil district are in the lead in their races. The Bloc also had candidates in both the annulled contests in north Cairo, both battling against an FJP lead. Independent candidates, many of them ex-members or supporters of the former ruling National Democratic Party, are also present in 15 contests, mostly against the FJP. The centre-right Wafd Party and the centrist Justice Party also have one candidate each. A spokesperson for the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, one of the main parties in the Egyptian Bloc, told Bikyamasr.com that there was no way of knowing how the low turn-out would affect results. She said that there continued to be electoral violations, mainly in the form of continued campaigning around polling stations, although the problems were on a much lesser scale than during the initial phase of voting. Egypt's official National Centre for Human Rights, meanwhile, criticized the slow response of the authorities to complaints about prohibited campaigning and the use of religious slogans. The Centre announced that it had received a total of 56 complaints by the end of the first day's voting, far below the hundreds recorded during the first round of voting. As before, these mainly related to campaigning outside polling stations, attempts to influence voters, and some cases of violence and bribery. The Freedom and Justice Party, for its part, announced that complaints had been recorded against the Egyptian Bloc candidate in Cairo's Qasr al-Nil district and that an election official had been accused of forging votes for a Bloc candidate in the Khalifa district. The role of religion in the elections continues to stir controversy, with the Egyptian Bloc distancing itself from recent statements by businessman Naguib Sawiris, founder of the Free Egyptians Party, the largest component of the Bloc. A statement from the ESDP denounced any form of polarization around religion and said that the Bloc was not represented by any individual's statements. According to Egypt's Shorouk newspaper, Sawiris had criticized the Islamist parties for receiving Gulf funding, and suggested that Western states could be led to respond in support of Egypt's Christians. The FJP's Muhammad al-Beltagi responded by accusing Sawiris of ‘wanting to tear the nation apart on a sectarian basis.” Religious affiliations have also been brought up in a spat between the Justice Party's Mustafa Najjar and FJP- and Nour-backed independent Islamist Muhammad Yousri, who are contesting one of the seats in Cairo's Madinat Nasr district. Najjar accused Yousri of being behind a leaflet that called on voters ‘not to betray Islam' by voting for him, and described him as “the Church's candidate”. Yousri, and the administrators of his campaign's Facebook page, angrily denied having anything to do with the leaflet. BM ShortURL: http://goo.gl/Ljyda Tags: Elections, featured Section: Egypt, Latest News
