Fatemah Farag reviews the chronicles of an election foretold A week before election day and the press is swamped in analyses and coverage of what is an unprecedented moment in Egyptian political history. In the midst of all the hoopla, however, we are reminded by Fahmi Howeidi in Al-Arabi that not all that shines is gold and that "not all electoral spectacles are signs of democracy." In the same issue Mohamed Shuman laments that "despite the fact that the presidential elections are chock full of statements and programmes of the various candidates, they are in total, closer to the production of one discourse, a discourse that is unfortunately false and disassociated from social practice. This is [a discourse] lacking in legitimacy and serious recipients amongst the public, especially the silent majority which does not find within this discourse anything new to drive it towards participation, especially as measures to insure the honesty of these elections is non-existent." Magdi Serhan in Al-Wafd on 29 August goes as far as to describe the ruling National Democratic Party discourse as a "clone of the opposition's discourse as if it has undergone surgery and put on a new head". The press was not only interested in the discourse but in practice as well. Take Magdi Mehana in Al-Masry Al-Youm on 26 August for example. He takes issue with the fact that the NDP presidential candidate, after hearing that farmers were having problems settling their debts with the Agricultural Development Bank, issued that debts be lifted and that the Minister of Agriculture immediately put his orders into effect. "This is clear electoral bribery by which the NDP candidate wants to gain the votes of farmers," wrote Mehana who goes on to wonder, "If these are the farmers' rights, why weren't they given such rights before? And if the Wafd or Ghad candidate had made such a statement, would the minister of agriculture have given his orders to have the debts removed?" In the next day's issue of the same paper Tarek El-Ghazali Harb tells us, "the most dangerous form of thuggery in my opinion is political thuggery which is in its most crystallised form these days." Harb goes on to ask how the ruling party can talk about "honesty and transparency" when basic information continues to be an impossibility to obtain. And how about the claim to "media excellence" "when the Egyptian people can't stand to listen to the media of their own country?" Talking of the general public, Mahmoud Khalil in Al-Masry Al-Youm on 28 August told his readers that while it is clear that Hosni Mubarak is the winner in these elections, in addition to the many restrictions that have rendered the electoral process undemocratic, we must acknowledge that the Egyptian people "by nature are not fans of change". Which is why, argues Khalil, many Egyptians support Mubarak. "They say 'we have tried him for over two decades. Who knows what someone else would be like, especially since the names of the other candidates are not known to us'. And there are others who quip that this government 'has stolen enough, which is why we should keep it because another government will come and start stealing from scratch,' as if stealing from the Egyptian people is our fate." Further, Hazem Abdel-Rahman in Al-Ahram on 28 August warns, "we must avoid enlarging and beautifying what is happening," as he goes on to point out that half of those who can vote do not have voting cards; that the time given after the amendment of the constitution and the election was not enough for candidates to prepare themselves; that political parties in Egypt still do not have the capability to manage such a campaign; and that "the weakest link in the campaign is that which concerns monitoring which has of yet to be decided." But at the end of the day Salah Eissa in Al-Wafd on 27 August argues against boycotting the elections. "[Such a boycott] seems to be revolutionary, reformist and radical but in reality it will not take us one step forward. Instead it will consolidate the [withdrawal from public life] of the silent majority." And finally both Al-Osbou and Sawt Al-Umma have taken issue with the statement of Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif to The New York Times regarding the responsibility of the Ministry of Interior in creating a tense situation in Sinai which may have resulted in the Sharm El-Sheikh bombings. Mahmoud Bakri in Al-Osbou wonders if this is the beginning of widespread change within the security establishment while Wael El-Ibrashi says the prime minister's statements "require the firing of the minister of interior and legal action against those responsible for security."
