The Supreme Presidential Elections Committee is gearing up for polling on Monday and Tuesday. Intensive meetings are being conducted with all concerned bodies to make sure that the two-day vote runs smoothly. The army and police are planning to deploy tens of thousands of soldiers to secure ballot stations and key government buildings. The intention is to make sure — “as much as possible,” as one police officer put it — that voters will be safe while casting their ballots and that all “possible targets for violent attacks — like the Ministries of Interior and Defence and the Presidential Palace” will be protected. State-run TV and radio stations are revising their election coverage plans. “The instructions are that we should avoid two things; making our coverage look too biased and focusing too much on very angry people,” said a TV anchor. Sources within the campaigns of the two candidates say a sense of realism prevails. Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi's campaign sources say they are confident that the former army chief will emerge the winner. Early indications from the voting of Egyptians expats suggest Al-Sisi is firmly in the lead. Al-Sisi's campaign team's greatest concern is turnout. In a recent TV interview Al-Sisi warned that the overwhelming sense of confidence in his victory might dissuade some of his supporters not to bother voting. The last thing that Al-Sisi's campaign wants is a turnout lower than in the first round of the 2012 presidential elections. “We are working on getting people to go and vote, not necessarily for our candidate, but to just go and vote,” said one campaign team member. In his meetings with selected professional and cultural groups and in media interviews Al-Sisi himself has urged all eligible voters to go to the polls. Political researcher Mohamed Al-Agati expects the turnout to be around the 35 per cent. “The figure will be similar to that for the referendum on the constitution in January. I doubt that the campaigning for a higher turnout being conducted by the supporters of both candidates will make much of a difference,” he says. Hamdeen Sabahi's team is struggling to win the support of young revolutionaries who have made it very clear that they have little faith in the electoral process. His campaign managers still hold out hope that the “negative messages that have come out of Al-Sisi with regards to political and human rights” will prompt “the young and the revolutionary who are inclined to boycott the political process to turn out and vote for Sabahi”. They are also, though more privately, hoping to win votes from among disgruntled Islamists who, though they have said they will boycott, may vote for Sabahi to register a protest against Al-Sisi. Neither quarter appears to be responding to Sabahi's overtures. Ashraf Thabet, a leading member of the Salafi Al-Nour Party, which has come out in support of Al-Sisi, does not expect a high turnout on the part of Islamists. “It is really hard to predict numbers. Some in the Islamist camp will vote for Al-Sisi and others will vote for Sabahi, even if just as an anti-Sisi tactic. The majority, however, will boycott.” Lawyer and activist Ahmed Hishmat senses “an unmistakable feeling of disenchantment among the young and revolutionaries whose support one might have assumed Sabahi could win”. He contrasts this with confidence felt among the ranks of Mubarak-era vested interest groups, traditional political and social forces that have faith in Al-Sisi and, “of course, the state bodies that are fully supporting Al-Sisi”. Short of a miracle the received wisdom is that Al-Sisi will win and Sabahi emerge as the leading opposition figure, the only politician who dared to stand against the former chief of the army. “Al-Sisi is the next president and the whole world knows it,” says Noha, 35, a housewife from Heliopolis who has joined a group of volunteers handing out flyers supporting Al-Sisi. The question is not, she says, who will be named president on 5 June — the day set to announce the winner and also the anniversary of Egypt's defeat in the 1967 war — but what will happen following the announcement. “We are looking forward to stability and security, economic recovery and improvements in tourism. We want an end to instability and the beginning of the reconstruction of a new Egypt that we all dream of,” she says. This rosy picture may be shared by many — observers expect Al-Sisi to win 75 per cent of votes on a turnout of 35 per cent — but some key political and cultural figures, concerned at the boycott by youth, revolutionary and intellectual quarters, question its feasibility. In his weekly article in the independent daily Al-Masry Al-Youm novelist Alaa Al-Aswani offered a disturbing picture of life under Al-Sisi in which the worst of Mubarak-era corruption, favouritism and human rights violations will be resurrected. Amin Iskandar, a weekly commentator in the same newspaper, voiced concern for the future of democracy and human rights under Al-Sisi. Hishmat finds these concerns “perfectly legitimate” given what Al-Sisi has said during the campaigning and what “we have seen in terms of gross violations during the months when he was senior deputy prime minister for security affairs”. Thabet is hoping the mistakes of the post-Morsi transition turn out to be the result of “political confusion”, and that once that confusion lifts human rights violations will diminish. “The situation is complicated,” says George Ishak, a leading opponent of both the Mubarak and Morsi regimes. On the one hand Al-Sisi has not shown much evidence of commitment to pursue the goals of the 25 January Revolution but he also cannot completely shrug off the revolutionary spirit “which goes beyond revolutionary figures” or count solely on the goodwill that “largely patient Egyptians” have shown so far.” “We have to see what the man will offer,” concludes Ishak. Al-Agati too, though alert to the signs of little if any commitment to the cause of democracy and justice “due to the influence of two of his most powerful backing groups, the security establishment and the business community”, believes we must “wait and see what he offers”. The fact that Al-Sisi has so far declined from offering a detailed programme —something it was rumoured would soon be reversed as Al-Ahram Weekly went to press — is making it difficult both for those who oppose the favourite to do so in concrete terms, and for those who are skeptical to make up their minds. Initially, Al-Agati argued, Al-Sisi will try to co-opt a team of reformists, either directly or indirectly. “He used reformists in drafting his programme — though their ideas were met with shrugs by his influential military and business backers. But once elected, and faced with an apprehensive public, he might have to implement at least some of their ideas.” The signs, though, are not all that positive. Al-Sisi's circle has seen the withdrawal of Amr Al-Chobaki, leading political scientist and a former parliamentarian, and the gradual stepping back of Amr Moussa, chair of the committee that drafted the constitution. Al-Agati expects more reformists to jump ship should the new president fail to deliver on basic demands. “Should this happen we will need to brace ourselves for a new phase of very vocal political opposition,” he says.
