The Wafd Party routed the banned Muslim Brotherhood in last week's Damanhour by-election. But did they? Late on the night of 9 January, Egyptian television announced that Khairi Kilig, a liberal- oriented Wafd Party candidate, had won a landslide victory in the parliamentary by- election for Damanhour -- the provincial capital of the northern Delta Governorate of Al- Beheira. The very brief announcement reported that Kilig crushed his rival Gamal Heshmat (of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood) by a vote of 16,862 to 965, reports Gamal Essam El-Din. The TV announcement, delivered without video footage, concluded with the claim that the Damanhour by-election was conducted under full judicial supervision and in an atmosphere of complete freedom, integrity, and police impartiality. In a rare moment of complete harmony with the pro-government media, Al-Wafd newspaper asserted that Kilig's victory was "an honest expression of the will of the people of Damanhour". The paper went on to declare the result a "victory for freedom and democracy, and a defeat for MPs who forfeited the support of the citizens of Damanhour". Independent and opposition newspapers, meanwhile, ordinarily in agreement with Al- Wafd on many political issues, begged to differ, calling Kilig's victory the result of a conspiracy between the Wafd Party and security forces. They said the event symbolised "yet another funeral for democratisation". The doubters point to the vast difference between the latest results and those of the original 2000 parliamentary elections in Damanhour, when Kilig was soundly defeated by Heshmat, who received more than 13,000 votes to Kilig's mere 3657. The pundits cynically asked how an opposition party candidate could turn such a humiliating defeat into a landslide victory in just two short years? With the help of the People's Assembly's NDP majority, the Brotherhood's Heshmat had his membership stripped on 15 December. The assembly was acting in response to a Cassation Court report which invalidated the Damanhour 2000 elections. The report said a grave vote-counting error had stripped Kilig of the right to compete against Heshmat in the run-off elections, and thus recommended that a new by-election between Heshmat and Kilig be held. Independent MP Adel Eid, who decided to freeze his membership in the assembly's legislative committee to protest what he said was an excessively hasty decision against Heshmat, led a group of independent and opposition MPs in calling for an inquiry into the arbitrary practices adopted by security forces in Damanhour's by-election. Observers were surprised when two Wafdist MPs, Mahmoud El-Shazli and Mohamed Abdel-Alim, opted to join forces with Eid. "We are members of a party which is supposed to be the champion of liberal democracy in Egypt. What happened in Damanhour goes against the principles of liberalism and is a setback to democratisation in Egypt," Abdel-Alim told Al- Ahram Weekly. The controversial by-election was a serious escalation in a ferocious two-year battle between the government and the banned Muslim Brotherhood that Mohamed Mursi, the speaker for the 17 (now 16) Muslim Brotherhood MPs, said stems from the fact that the government has never tolerated the Brotherhood's winning an unprecedented 17 seats in the 2000 parliamentary elections. Mursi told the Weekly that "security forces have been mobilised over the last two years to keep the Brotherhood off balance, via frequent arrests and harassment. This happened in the Shura (Consultative) Council's June 2001 elections, in the April 2002 municipal elections (which the Brotherhood chose to boycott) and in last June's by-election in the Alexandria district of Al-Raml." Mursi sees the Damanhour by-election results as a new message from the government indicating that the Brotherhood's chances of winning seats in the 2005 parliamentary elections are doomed. Prime Minister Atef Ebeid, addressing the Assembly on Saturday, said the fact that the Brotherhood had won 17 seats in the 2000 elections was testimony to Egypt's expanding freedoms and political reform. Mursi responded by arguing that the Brotherhood's success owed more to the full judicial supervision which accompanied the first and second stages of those elections. The Damanhour by-election, said Mursi, has seriously tarnished Egypt's image in regional and international circles "at a time the Arab world is under mounting pressure to democratise its political and electoral systems". On election day, more than 500 trucks loaded with dozens of central security forces from Al-Beheira and other neighbouring governorates were mobilised to impose a sort of police siege on the districts of Damanhour and Zawyet Ghazal. Heshmat's office -- overlooking Al-Beheira's police investigation department -- was placed under strict security surveillance. Heshmat said his supporters were banned from plastering campaign banners, with some of them even arrested two days in advance of the election. Kilig meanwhile, according to Heshmat, was allowed to move freely throughout Damanhour, his supporters unencumbered by police harassment. Heshmat also claimed that his supporters were stopped by police forces from casting their votes. "Citizens who were allowed to vote were the ones holding voting cards with certain designs on them. We reckon that some of them were summoned from outside Al-Beheira to do this dirty job," Heshmat said. In Heshmat's opinion, the Damanhour by- election was manipulated by security forces instructed by the NDP to kill two birds with one stone: intimidate the Brotherhood away from participating in political life; and pretend the NDP respects Cassation Court reports about election results. According to Zohdi El-Shami, chairman of the leftist Tagammu Party's Beheira Committee, the NDP's "pose" of being respectful of court reports on election results was just a gimmick. El-Shami argued that he was one of many candidates competing against Heshmat for Damanhour's professionals (fi'at) seat in 2000. Most of those who lost to Heshmat, said El-Shami, filed election appeals with the Cassation Court. "Why was the court's report on Kilig's appeal singled out and adopted by the NDP-backed People's Assembly? The court also accepted my appeal and recommended that a re-election be held in Damanhour featuring all the candidates, and not just Heshmat and Kilig," El-Shami told reporters. After taking his oath of office on Saturday, Kilig, the new Wafdist MP, described the Damanhour by-election as one of complete integrity. He told the Weekly that even though he "could not deny that Heshmat got the highest number of votes in the 2000 elections, he lost his popularity soon thereafter by drifting away from Damanhour's needs. He ignored his constituency, preferring to show up on Arab television screens and especially Al-Jazeera, Osama Bin Laden's favourite news channel." Kilig, a famous lawyer, said Heshmat's obsession with attacking the ministries of culture and education as a way of appealing to the people as "the guardian of Islam and moral principles" did not go over well with "the people of Damanhour, who saw him trying to boost the Brotherhood's image in Damanhour's name and at the expense of solving its citizens' problems". According to another Damanhour lawyer, Ahmed Abu-Rahma, who spoke to theWeekly, "Kilig is a good man, and an excellent lawyer. We wanted him to win the Damanhour seat but we certainly did not want him to win in such a shameful way."
