The ruling party clinched a victory over the banned Muslim Brotherhood in the controversial parliamentary elections of Alexandria's Al-Raml district. Gamal Essam El-Din saw it happen In the late hours of 27 June, Egyptian television interrupted its regular broadcast to announce breaking news. The announcement, which took both ordinary citizens and political pundits by surprise, said that two candidates of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) had won landslide victories in the parliamentary elections for Alexandria's Al-Raml district. The NDP's candidates, Sami El- Guindi, an Alexandria University professor running for the professionals' (fi'at) seat and Gomaa El-Gharabawi, a public sector employee running for the workers' ('umal) seat, received 5,951 and 5,875 votes respectively. El-Guindi and El-Gharabawi's two major rivals, Muslim Brotherhood candidates Gihan El-Halafawi, who ran for the professionals' seat, and El- Mohammadi Sayed who aimed for the workers', won only 530 and 426 votes respectively. The above figures contrasted sharply with the results of the 2000 parliamentary elections for the two seats in which the NDP's two candidates were dealt a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Brotherhood's two candidates. The results for those elections, which were subsequently annulled by the Interior Ministry in response to a court ruling, were much closer. (Since the results were annulled the seats had remained vacant). The Brotherhood's El-Halafawi and Sayed obtained 3,635 and 3,335 votes respectively, to the 1,200 and 1,000 votes won by the NDP's El-Guindi and El-Gharabawi. Run-offs had been scheduled because the leading candidates had failed to win a majority of the votes cast for their seats, but the Interior Ministry postponed those polls. Last week's elections signalled a turning point in the long-time electoral rivalry between the NDP and the Brotherhood. The parliamentary elections of the year 2000 saw the NDP lose 218 seats to opposition and independent candidates, of which the Brotherhood won an unprecedented 17. For the mid-term elections of parliament's upper house, the Shura (Consultative) Council, which were conducted in June 2001, the Brotherhood failed to win a single seat, and three of its candidates were arrested while registering to stand for election. Following the Shura elections the Brotherhood boycotted this April's municipal elections. El-Halafawi, the wife of active Brotherhood member and secretary- general of the Alexandria chapter of the Doctors' Syndicate, Ibrahim El- Zaafarani, told Al-Ahram Weekly that a police campaign against Brotherhood candidates began two days before Al-Raml elections were held on 27 June. During those two days, security forces arrested 15 Brotherhood members. Detainees include Ahmed Mukheimar, a journalist with Afaq Arabiya (Arab Horizons, the Brotherhood's mouthpiece) and Ayman Nour, a computer engineer. The two were members of El-Halafawi's campaign team. On 25 June, Alexandria's Administrative Court ordered the public notary offices to provide the persons designated by the Brotherhood candidates to represent them at Al- Raml's polling stations with official papers certifying their rolls in the elections. The court also ordered that the candidates be allowed to obtain the district voter list from police stations. El-Halafawi said that the Interior Ministry completely ignored the court's orders. "The certifications were confiscated and some of our designates were detained by police. The voters' lists we received had been altered to the extent that they were completely different from the real ones," El-Halafawi said. On election day, security forces were deployed throughout Al-Raml, one of Alexandria's most densely populated areas with 160,000 voters, and were particularly in force outside polling stations. As expected, the Al- Raml elections witnessed a violent confrontation between citizens and security forces. Within two days of the elections the number of Brotherhood supporters that had been detained pending investigation by the Supreme State Security Prosecution had risen to 101. The detainees, most of them members of the Brotherhood's Alexandria branch, were charged with inciting social unrest and leading demonstrations. With respect to the arrested Brotherhood members, the Interior Ministry released a statement saying, "They were arrested in a coffee shop where they were preparing their plans. They were in possession of LE110,000, $1,930 and some jewelry that they claimed to have collected from citizens in support of the Palestinian Intifada." The statement added that some of the detainees were in possession of a book entitled The Great Jihad. The book accused the government of mounting a war against devout Muslims, and it urged citizens to launch a counter-Jihad in the name of protecting Islam from its enemies. Correspondents for some Arab and foreign satellite TV stations and press organisations were harassed outside polling stations by security forces and NDP supporters. Some of the journalists were detained for a few hours and their equipment confiscated. NDP supporters had a markedly different experience as they went to the polls. The NDP transported members to polling stations in air-conditioned buses and when they brandished their white party-membership cards for security forces outside the stations, they found no difficulty in entering them. El-Sayed Rashed, the NDP MP for Alexandria's Sidi Gaber district and deputy speaker of the People's Assembly, told Al-Ahram Weekly that "it is really disgusting to listen to the Brothers and Arab TV satellite stations accusing the NDP of manipulating the elections in its favour. Yes, it was a matter of life and death for us. The NDP is going through a phase of complete reform and restructuring. It was the duty of Alexandria's MPs to firmly stand behind the party's two candidates in Al- Raml". Rashed, who is also chairman of the General Egyptian Federation of Trade Unions (GEFTU), added that over the last two years, the NDP's newly-appointed general secretariat for its Alexandria branch exerted great efforts to promote the NDP in the district. "We held many meetings there and worked hard to improve living conditions. It is not surprising that Al-Raml citizens would cast their votes for NDP candidates." Hamdi Hassan and Hussein Ibrahim, two Brotherhood MPs for Alexandria's Mena Al-Basal district, described the Al-Raml elections "as another funeral for democratisation in Egypt". Hassan accused security forces of doing their utmost to intimidate Al-Raml residents from voting for the Brotherhood candidates. When asked how the NDP managed to achieve such a resounding victory over the Brotherhood, Hassan told the Weekly, "There is no explanation except that security forces have been at war with the Brotherhood since 2000." Hassan noted that the first stage of parliamentary elections in 2000, which included Alexandrian districts, was held under complete judicial supervision. "That was something new for security forces," he said, "which is why they were unable to prevent five Brotherhood candidates from winning in this stage. They were also unable to intimidate Al-Raml constituents from voting for the Brotherhood candidates." Hassan added that in the interim between 2000 and last week's elections, security forces developed their tactics in the "war" against the Brotherhood and they simply prevented people from entering polling stations. "This proved successful in the third stage [which included Cairo and Giza and other six governorates], as the Brotherhood won just two seats."
