CAIRO: Former United States President Jimmy Carter, fresh off his visit to Egypt, has called on Washington to support the results of the country's first post-Hosni Mubarak elections that saw conservative Islamic parties take the lion's share of votes. “What has happened in Egypt boosts democracy and freedom,” Carter said in an interview with CNN. He argued that for Egypt, it is an opportunity to create the democratic change through an elected government and can enable the country to have similar rights as free societies across the globe. Carter said that the US rejection of the Islamist victory in Palestine in 2005 was a mistake and called on the Obama administration to not repeat that error. “I think it was a big mistake. Maybe we would now have peace in the Middle East if we had recognised a new, elected new government and supported and worked with it,” he argued. “We are now behaving differently, by giving the Islamists the chance to rule,” he commented. Carter met earlier this month with Mohamed el-Morsi, the Chairman of Egypt's new Freedom and Justice Party, the political arm of Muslim Brotherhood, during his visit and congratulated the party on its successes in the election, which his organization, The Carter Center, helped monitor. “The former US President has called on the FJP to accommodate nascent and new parties of youth which have not won many seats in the recent elections,” the FJP stated in a statement posted on its website. El-Morsi told Carter that a mixed presidential-parliamentary model was the best for Egypt in the current transitional phase, adding that it can be transformed into a full parliamentary system after the completion of the democratic process. “I think the Muslim Brotherhood are not anything to be afraid of in the forthcoming [Egyptian] political situation and the evolution I see as most likely,” Carter added. During his visit, Carter said his organization was “very pleased” with the conduct of the elections so far. “There have been some problems in general, but the will of the people has been expressed accurately,” Carter told reporters at polling station in a girls school in the Cairo neighborhood of Rod al-Farag. Not everyone was convinced at Carter's statements however, including Mariam Yussif, who was at the polling station on Tuesday. She told Bikyamasr.com that it is easy to miss interpret the elections because Carter “does not really understand Egypt and our society. “What he really needs to do is look at how the lead-up to the elections were, what was happening and how that created an unfair election,” she argued. Many activists have also voiced her concerns, saying the ongoing military violence in November and early December created a situation where people were burying and caring for loved ones injured or killed in violent battles with police and military, instead of heading to the polls to vote. The Muslim Brotherhood's political wing, The Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) and the ultra-conservative al-Nour Party have won a combined 60 percent of seats in the new parliament, which will be tasked to ink a new constitution. BM ShortURL: http://goo.gl/OnGuo Tags: Elections, featured, FJP, Jimmy Carter, Muslim Brotherhood, United States Section: Egypt, Latest News
