It has been some 25 years now since I first began voting in national elections, and in all those years I have never experienced a greater quandary than the one I faced this week as a result of the complex voting system introduced into the country following the 25 January uprising. The system adopted is a combination of two systems: a majority system for individuals, who will constitute one third of the lower chamber of the new parliament, and a closed party list system that will fill the other two-thirds. The way the constituencies have been created and the seats assigned has complicated matters further, since the size of each constituency differs according to the voting system. Cairo, for example, has been divided into four constituencies for the party list voting and nine for the individual voting, with 36 seats allocated to the former and 18 to the latter, two for each of the nine constituencies. While candidates on the party list system are decided following the primary ballot, run-off elections are held the following week to decide the two individual winners in each constituency. In the first stage of the elections – itself divided into three stages, each covering nine out of a total of 27 governorates and each taking place over a period of two weeks, the first for primaries and the other for run-offs – only four individual seats out of a total of 56 were won on the first round, three in Cairo and one in Port Said. As I write on Tuesday evening, the polling stations have just closed after two days of run-off elections involving 104 candidates contesting the 52 remaining individual seats across nine governorates. Candidates from the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, are contesting 90 per cent of the seats (45 to be precise), and news of the vote count as I write reveal that they have already won some 30 seats. My personal dilemma with the new voting system became apparent last week as I went to vote in the first round. I had little problem with the party list ballot since I had made up my mind to vote for a coalition of small parties that had been active in the Revolution but had very little chance of winning substantial numbers of votes. I have to admit, though, that it felt a bit strange voting for an idea rather than a person. It was the second, individual ballot, however, that represented the problem: I had been trying in vain for a week to select two individuals from the over one hundred candidates running, but I had not been able to do so. I did not recognise most of the names, and those I did recognise were members of the former ruling party, and I was not going to vote for them under any circumstances. I ended up voting on the party list ballot, but crossed out the individual sheet to spoil my vote, thinking that once the selection process had narrowed down to four candidates in the run-off, I should be able to choose. The next week I discovered to my dismay that the four candidates from which I had to chose included two members of the FJP, running opposite one Salafist from the Nour Party and a notoriously right-wing former member of the former ruling party who has represented the constituency for as long as I could remember. I was glad to see that he had got the least number of votes in the primaries, and I thought he would probably lose without any interference from me. As for the FJP candidates running opposite the Nour Party member, since I knew neither of them I decided that I should abstain from participating in the run-off elections. Though myself a leftist and a secularist, I could have voted for an individual member of the Muslim Brotherhood, depending on his record, as an act of solidarity with an opposition group that had been victimised for so long by the former Mubarak regime. However, given the excellent results they had scored in the first stage of the elections, I was content for them to be very well represented in the new parliament without any solidarity on my part. Thus far, the Brotherhood has garnered around 40 per cent of the votes in the first stage of the elections, which included Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt's two largest urban centres. There is no reason why this trend should not continue in the rural districts, for a long time now considered to be the group's stronghold. While the success of the Brotherhood in the elections was hardly a surprise to anyone, the rise of the Salafist Nour Party has constituted a surprise – a threat perhaps – as a result of the Party's almost 25 per cent of the votes in the first stage. This has sent out shock waves in every direction, and, in a country with a Christian minority of over ten per cent, it is natural that Egyptian Christians should feel the heat most. However, many educated middle and upper-middle class people in Egypt of Muslim background have been equally worried that the Nour Party's electoral success may be the first step towards restricting their personal freedom by introducing strict Islamic legislation in a new parliament in which the Islamists look set to win a clear majority. The FJP has been quick to issue conciliatory statements guaranteeing its respect for personal liberties and democratic rules. Over and again the Party has said that it does not want to repeat the Algerian experience of the 1990s, or that of Hamas, but the Party's statements notwithstanding many feel that the proof of the pudding may lie in the eating. Until parliament convenes, and the process of writing the country's new constitution begins, the present state of polarisation will continue, if it does not even increase. Ziyad Bahaa Eddin, an international lawyer and frontrunner for the liberal Egyptian Bloc party list of Assiut who has already secured his seat, wrote in his weekly column in Tuesday's Al-Shorouk daily that the present elections process has already shown that the nation was divided along confessional lines: "Unfortunately the division that many people have been warning against has already taken place. During the present elections it became clear that such division occurred first along civil-religious lines, only to be followed by a Muslim-Christian division. This is a threat to both elections and the country's future," Bahaa Eddin wrote. He is right, as this week's run-off elections have clearly demonstrated that all Christians and many secular Muslims were voting against all and any groups associated with Political Islam. Some people I know, given the choice between an Islamist and a former member of the former ruling party, voted for the latter as the lesser of the two evils. The newly-adopted voting system seems to have exacerbated the situation, rather than allowing for a simpler choice based on each candidate's record.
