CAIRO: The Muslim Brotherhood-backed Freedom and Justice Party is sweeping the boards in the run-off contests for 50 individual seats in the Egyptian parliament, as the Salafis fail to attract support beyond their own voting base. With results for 33 seats available as of 4:00AM Wednesday, the FJP and its allies have taken 24 and are well-placed to win more. The hardline Salafi Nour party and its allies have performed poorly, taking only 2 seats by 4:00AM. In five of the nine seats where Nour had come first in the initial votes last week, FJP and independent candidates overcame its lead in the run-offs. Prominent Salafi leader Abdel Moneim Shahat has lost to the FJP by 28,000 votes in his Alexandria base, despite a first-round lead. The Free Egyptians have taken one seat in Cairo's Qasr al-Nil district, while veteran leftist Al-Badri Farghali beat the Nour candidate to take a seat for Tagammu in Port Said. Both parties are in the liberal to centre-left Egyptian Bloc. Former Wafd MP Umran Mogahed has picked up a seat for The Revolution Continues alliance in Damietta along with three FJP members, as Nour's strong showing in the governorate's list constituency was not reflected in the two individual constituencies. In Heliopolis Hisham Suleiman, an independent linked to the former ruling National Democratic Party, has taken a seat. Prominent activist Mustafa Naggar, president of the centrist Justice Party, won a seat in Cairo's Madinat Nasr district, beating Sheikh Muhammad Yousri, an independent supported by the FJP and Nour. Naggar and Yousri had engaged in a high-profile spat when the Justice Party leader accused his opponent of being behind a leaflet that called on voters ‘not to betray Islam' by voting for him and described him as “the Church's candidate.” Yousri, and the administrators of his campaign's Facebook page, have angrily denied having anything to do with the leaflet. The other seat in Madinat Nasr has gone to an independent revolutionary youth candidate, Amr Farouq. In further controversy regarding the role of religion in the elections, the Egyptian Bloc has distanced itself from recent remarks by businessman Naguib Sawiris, founder of the Free Egyptians Party, the largest component of the Bloc. A statement from the Egyptian Social Democratic Party denounced any form of polarization around religion and said that the Bloc was not represented by any individual's statements. According to Egypt's Shorouk newspaper, Sawiris had criticized the Islamist parties for receiving Gulf funding, and suggested that Western states could be asked to respond in support of Egypt's Christians. The FJP's Muhammad al-Beltagi in turn accused Sawiris of “wanting to tear the nation apart on a sectarian basis.” Voting was slow on Monday and Tuesday, with Egyptian media reporting a possible total poll of around 30%, as opposed to the 52% who voted last week. After the first day of voting on Monday evening, the Freedom and Justice Party, the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, estimated turn-out at 20-25%. A spokesperson for the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, one of the main parties in the Egyptian Bloc, told Bikyamasr.com that she thought very few voters were willing to head to the polls a second time. She said that there continued to be electoral violations, mainly in the form of continued campaigning around polling stations, although the problems were on a much lesser scale than during the initial phase of voting. Egypt's official National Centre for Human Rights, meanwhile, criticized the slow response of the authorities to complaints about prohibited campaigning and the use of religious slogans. The Centre announced that it had received a total of 56 complaints by the end of the first day's voting, far below the hundreds recorded during the first round of voting. As before, these mainly related to campaigning outside polling stations, attempts to influence voters, and some cases of violence and bribery. The Freedom and Justice Party, for its part, announced that complaints had been recorded against the Egyptian Bloc candidate in Cairo's Qasr al-Nil district and that an election official had been accused of forging votes for a Bloc candidate in the Khalifa district. BM
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