CAIRO: Egypt's Supreme Electoral Committee has announced the results of the first round of voting for the country's new parliament. Only four members of parliament have been officially elected, with candidates for the remaining 52 first-round individual seats going to run-off contests on 5 and 6 December. The turnout for the elections was 8.5 million, representing 62 percent of the 13.6 million eligible voters. The head of the SEC stated that this was the highest level of participation in any election in Egypt's history. The victorious candidates in the first stage are Amr Hamzawy of the Egypt Freedom Party in Heliopolis, north-eastern Cairo; the independent Arab nationalist Mustafa Bakri, editor of the Elaosboa newspaper, and the Freedom and Justice Party's Ramadan Omar, both in Helwan, southern Cairo; and the Freedom and Justice Party's Akram Al-Sha'ir in Port Said. The results announced today are for the 56 seats being contested by individual candidates in two-member constituencies. Each constituency elects one worker or peasant and one candidate from all other professional groups. In the 25 districts where no candidate was elected, the top two worker or peasant candidates will go into the run-off along with the top two other candidates, for both seats. In Heliopolis and Port Said, the elected candidates were ‘others', so only the worker candidates will go into the run-off for the remaining seat. Among other prominent names, it has been confirmed that the independent candidate and former leading member of the Ghad party, Gameela Ismail, has been eliminated from the race in Cairo's Qasr al-Nil constituency. The individual seats account for one third of the seats being voted for in the first round. A further 112 seats will be allocated to party lists running in broader constituencies, but these results will only be released after the completion of the voting in all governorates in January. The head of the Supreme Electoral Committee, Abdel Moezz Ibrahim, congratulated the Egyptian people on the conduct of the elections, which, he said, had been welcomed by human rights organizations and internationally. Ibrahim said that there had been many problems in the electoral process, but these did not affect the overall transparency and reliability of the results. The main issue was candidates and their supporters engaging in campaigning activities outside polling stations. There were also issues with access to polling stations for elderly and disable voters. In some cases ballot papers and the official stamps with which they had to be marked had been late arriving at polling stations. There were also some very limited cases of violence, but Ibrahim said that these did not affect the process. The SEC was studying the problems that had been experienced, Ibrahim said, and was determined to overcome them in the next phases of the election. Among the steps they were considering was transporting the ballot papers and stamps to the supervisory judges the day before the opening of polls. Meanwhile, the Freedom and Justice Party has published figures for its own performance in the list constituencies, indicating that it has received 35 percent of the votes in the 13 constituencies where counting has been completed. Two of Cairo's four constituencies and one of Alexandria's two constituencies are not included in the figures. BM
