Abdel-Moneim Said bids farewell to protest and hails the nitty-gritty of politics Until very recently two outlooks on Egypt's political future prevailed. The first, which was the most widespread in the region and abroad, was based on wishful thinking, poor or incomplete information, and short-sightedness. It supposed that Egypt was on the brink of a revolutionary upheaval of some form. Although it found its most strident voice on satellite television stations, even ordinary daily newspapers were sometimes overcome by the desire for a reverberating explosion. There were political movements that saw in the sudden appearance by unions before the camera a way to alter the course of history. Respectable Western political research centres, such as the Carnegie Institute in the US, believed this prognosis and seized upon its proponents as valid sources of information on the political and economic realities facing Egypt, ignoring any inconvenient facts on the ground. Perhaps part of this has to do with the fact that the international media is a high- pressure, fast-paced business. It doesn't have much time to spend on details. So it was probably grabbed by some sensational element in this narrative and its various subplots and decided to give it a few seconds of airtime and lines of print. To read some of the accounts one would think that another shade of those orange and purple revolutions was about to erupt on the banks of the Nile, especially after the ex-IAEA chief alighted from Vienna like some mediaeval knight with a Nobel Prize blazoned on his shield and supporters willing to make state-of-the-art forays on Facebook. The second, more convincing outlook, maintains that Egypt is an old and continuous polity. It may have passed through many phases, but they followed in unbroken procession. In Egypt change is a cumulative process rather than one that moves by fitful leaps and bounds. The country might have suffered the occasional setback but soon found itself back on its feet on the path to progress, progressing step by step, much as the Nile flows calmly from source to mouth. This outlook originally has its roots in the notion that stability is a fundamental value in Egyptian culture. In a riparian country chaos is not just an ill, it is a sin. There is nothing particularly heartening in the experiences of countries that have followed the brightly coloured paths of change. As great as the lure of democracy is its existence in a country that lacks a strong state, an advanced industrialised economy and a robust middle class is a shortcut to the most extreme degrees of despotism. Moreover, one need only look at developments in the Press and Lawyers' syndicates to grasp how democratic slogans have come to mask faces that have indulged in every form of dictatorship and even fascism, down to uniforms and flags. The venerable liberal who sped home from Vienna on his white horse soon fell into the embrace of camps, on both the left and right, that display not an iota of liberalism. In all events, the magician's wand backfired. A campaign that was meant to garner five million signatures, complete with addresses and national identity numbers, ultimately produced an alleged million, two-thirds of which are Internet signatures of dubious provenance. The second outlook on Egypt's future is rooted in the belief that the Egyptian state is founded upon institutions, regardless of their problems and flaws. It is these institutions that hold the key to continuity, for they are grounded in a respect for the convention and authority of the relevant instruments of law. This outlook is further supported by the fact that the changes that are currently taking place in Egypt are far more positive and encouraging than certain quarters claim, even if we might wish for more. During the past five years the Egyptian economy grew at an average rate of 6.4 per cent. Had it not been for the global economic crisis, the rate would have topped seven per cent. During the same period some trillion Egyptian pounds were invested in the country. Assets in Egyptian banks exceeded LE800 billion and the country held more than $34 billion in reserves. A total of 8,000 companies were established in 2008 compared to 2,750 in 2002, and four million young Egyptians became owners or partners of private enterprises. To speak of an immanent revolution against such a backdrop is a form of delusion. Although the first outlook was widely held, recently it has faded. It has become more and more clear that the National Assembly for Change is not all that different from other organisations such as Kifaya and its clones and offshoots, the Popular Campaign for Change, the National Rally for Democratic Transition, Shayfinku (We see you) and the 6 April Youth movement. From a practical point of view members of these groups placed all their eggs in one basket, demanding a boycott of legislative and presidential elections if their calls for constitutional changes went unanswered. The demand was voiced with the assurance of those who imagine that changing the rules while the game is in progress is axiomatic to Egyptian politics. I am also amazed that the participants in the boycott call have not heeded the lessons from the history of election boycotts in Egypt, both before the 1952 revolution and afterwards. It is a dismal legacy. Consider, for example, that by boycotting the 1990 parliamentary elections, the Wafd and Labour Parties and the Muslim Brotherhood succeeded only in cutting themselves off from the political arena for five years. It was a sobering lesson, but one that has been forgotten, or not grasped at all, by such political groupings as the Democratic Front, the Ayman Nour wing of Ghad (Tomorrow) and the as yet unlicensed Karama (Dignity) Party. Such parties are on the political fringe of society. The heart of society, upon which proponents of the second outlook base their prognosis, deals with politics in another way, invoking Egypt's historical continuity and established traditions of political interaction. The most telling indication that these qualities have prevailed was the decision, taken by the general assembly of the Wafd Party on 18 September, to take part in the forthcoming parliamentary elections. The decision, which was passed by 504 of the 923 members present, or by a 56.7 per cent majority, sent a signal to other opposition parties. The Progressive Nationalist Unionist Party and the Nasserist Party are expected to follow the Wafd while the Democratic Front, which takes its cues from the fringes instead of from the heart of Egyptian politics and its institutionalised way of doing things, has consigned itself to the cold. Other parties, such as the Democratic Generation Party, the Liberal Party, the Egyptian Greens, the Egyptian Youth Party, the Egyptian Arab Socialist Party and the Solidarity Party have formed an "Alliance of Egyptian Parties" that is currently considering whether or not to take part. Another alliance -- the "Party Bloc" -- is engaged in a similar decision-making process. The bloc now consists of three parties: the People's Party, the Democratic Unionist Party and the Free Republican Party. The Egyptian Arab Socialist Party, the Conservatives, the Umma Party and Al-Wifaq (National Conciliation) had originally members but left following internal divisions. As the elections have approached Egyptian political life has resumed its normal course. Official parties with an institutionalised character are moving to engage more effectively in the political process. This has been borne out in the exchanges between the NDP and the Wafd, the Progressive Nationalist Union Party, the Nasserist Party and the Democratic Front over guarantees for the integrity of the forthcoming polls. We are not witnessing a repeat of past experiences when opposition parties and their candidates raced into the electoral fray despite their reservations. All participants have clearly benefited from, and are capitalising on, changes that have taken place in society over the past five years. The Wafd is a case in point. The party has undergone a sea of change since its leadership passed to a team that is more pragmatic, more influential and armed with five television stations and two well-known and widely distributed newspapers ( Al-Wafd and Al-Dostour ). One of the first tangible fruits of this change is that the party increased its seats in the People's Assembly from five to 14, which has given it considerably more weight and appeal than it had before. That this can happen to a long-established party, that has headquarters and growing grassroots bases in all the governorates, that cannot complain of a shortage of finances and that has succeeded, under its former leadership, in propelling younger and more dynamic elements to the fore in its political activities, testifies to significant advances in Egyptian politics which will have important results in the coming phase. The Wafd, like other parties that understand the traditions of multiparty politics, realises that one of the chief aims of a party is to reach power by means of participating in electoral processes. Boycott and seclusion are the last course of action one would expect it to follow at a time when it is pressing for political, economic and legislative change. Rule number one of the democratic game is that you can't win reform by fighting outside the arena or heckling from the stalls. In addition, participating in the democratic process and gaining parliamentary seats enhances the prospects of promoting democratic transition. The opposition parties should bear in mind the bitter lesson from the boycott of the 1990 elections and summon the gumption to wage the electoral battles that will allow them to enter parliament. Then they can wage the battle for democratisation beneath parliament's dome. Another important development since 2005 is that Egypt's elections will receive broader and more intensive media coverage than ever before. When state-run television and the government press are no longer alone in the field competition between different points of view plays a dominant role in the campaigns. Coverage will extend well beyond the local media. There are now 690 Arabic speaking television stations that could home in on our elections, not to mention non-Arabic speaking networks, as well as innumerable newspapers of every hue, in both printed and electronic form. There is also a growing domestic and international civil society network that will make its presence felt and ensure that foreign "monitoring" of our elections becomes a de facto reality whether the NDP, Wafd, Progressive Rally and Nasserists approve or not. The Egyptian political scene has undergone a third and no less important change in favour of democratic transition. The NDP, itself, has undergone major transformations in the last five years. Not only has the ruling party's membership climbed to nearly three million, the age composition of the party has changed. Now 65 per cent of party members are in the 18 to 40 year-old age bracket, 30 per cent are aged between 40 and 60 year and only five per cent are over 60. In other words, a new generation now makes up the majority of the NDP. The occupational and educational make-up of the party has changed, too. There are now around 6,700 masters and doctorate degree holders, among them university professors, businessmen, doctors, engineers, journalists, lawyers, army officers, civil servants and members of other professions. Many of these have undertaken studies and research and drafted policy papers on the country's most pressing concerns -- education, healthcare, insurance, the state of women's and children's rights and welfare, random urban development and energy. The NDP has changed structurally as well. One of the most significant changes is its adoption of electoral colleges to select candidates in the governorates. The new system compels NDP nominees to engage in fierce internal elections before they can field themselves for parliamentary seats, thereby filtering out the possibility of unqualified nominees and promoting the best educated, most widely respected and dedicated to their constituencies and to the party's platform. The NDP has equipped itself to enter a fair and honourable race, whether against rival parties or against independents who resign from the NDP to run in the elections and then rejoin afterwards. This latter phenomenon, which we have seen in previous elections, gives the impression that the party won more seats than it deserved. In fact, figures show that it has suffered the same fate as all political parties in power: a decline in popularity. While the NDP won 40 per cent of the votes in the 1995 People's Assembly elections, it won 38 per cent in 2000 and 32 per cent in 2005. Perhaps the opposition parties have caught on to this fact. If they have, not only should they fight to win the votes of the electorate, they should also try to win over independents who see elections as an avenue towards serving their constituents and who share a common loathing of everything that might threaten the stability of the country and its natural march towards progress. The upshot of the foregoing is that two parallel developments have unfolded. The first is the defeat of the boycott trend, and along with it all those who sought to propel the country to a revolutionary moment that runs against the Egyptian grain. The Egyptian body politic has proven once again that it rejects the margins and fringes and the many vociferous protest movements. This is not just because of their paltry number of members, but also because of the weakness of their protest mechanisms and their lack of institutionalised means for handling internal conflicts which quickly betray their leaders' quest for stardom and their mania for scoring points. The second development is the emergence of a realistic civil society alliance concerned with rectifying some of the consequences of the 2005 elections, the most serious being a sharp polarisation between the NDP, which found itself virtually alone in calling for a civil state, and the Muslim Brothers, whose sole campaign platform consisted of the call for a theocracy. The polarisation was disturbing and one of the factors that led to the rise of the "political fringes" whose clamour even deceived a prominent and seasoned figure such as Mohamed El-Baradei, who might have made a significant contribution to democratic transition if he had had a better grasp of the Egyptian commitment to instruments of law and was prepared to take part in the process through legitimate channels. Now that the "boycott" battle has subsided and political life has returned to normal, we must turn our attention to an essential task, which is to ensure that the polls are fair and above suspicion. Then we can truly look forward to an exciting race in which the contestants vie to set the course for the nation in the coming period. May the best candidates win!
