CAIRO - Scores of Egyptian women of every age Sunday headed to female-only poll stations, to vote in parliamentary elections, marked by a special representation for women as candidates and voters. The number of women in the People's Assembly (the Lower House of the Parliament) this term will skyrocket with 64 seats set aside for them: only four women were elected in the 2005 legislature. “I only came here to vote for the Minister of Oil and I don't care at all for this quota thing,” Ibtisam Marzouk, a woman in her seventies living in the upmarket Cairo area of Nasr City, told The Egyptian Gazette quite openly, adding that she did not know a thing about any of the candidates for the 64 above-mentioned seats. “Their campaigns have been far weaker than those of the male candidates,” Marzouk explained, while leaving the station that was surrounded by the supporters of and campaigners for the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP). Around 380 female candidates from the NDP, opposition parties and the banned Muslim Brotherhood were vying for the 64 seats allocated for women in this Parliament, which means that women's representation will leap by a whopping 1,500 per cent, as 12 per cent of the new house will consist of women. Rana Afifi, a 24-year-old resident of Heliopolis in eastern Cairo, said that she wouldn't vote for any female candidate ��" whether running for the quota or as an independent candidate. “They won't serve people in their districts as efficiently as the male candidates,” stressed the young woman. “We didn't see them here before the voting. Their campaigns are far weaker than their male counterparts'.” In this round of elections, there are a lot of big names competing for the quota seats, including: NDP candidate Madiha Khattab, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Cairo University; Mona Makram Ebeid, a former parliamentarian representing Al-Wafd liberal party and a professor of political science at the American University in Cairo; and independent activist Gamila Ismail. The quota will only last for two rounds of elections, expiring in 2020, but women running for the seats hope the system will jumpstart a new paradigm in Egyptian politics. “It's a big challenge for her as a woman to take part in these elections, but being an Islamist makes it much harder, especially with the huge influence of the NDP and its candidates on the polls,” said a supporter of Manal Abul Hassan, an independent candidate in Heliopolis. The race for the quota seats was ��" like the whole elections ��" marred by accusations of violence, vote-buying and fraud. “Special reports” have accused the NDP quota hopefuls of manipulation. “It's a shame that some quota hopefuls have been walking around with gangs of angry young people, who attack other candidates and rip up their promotional material,” said Mohamed Adel, a supporter of an independent quota hopeful affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood. Adel added that a lot of illegal things happened yesterday and that NDP campaigners were allowed to enter the poll stations with their voters. “It's a farce and that shouldn't be allowed in a real democratic process,” he said angrily. In some ways, this new wave of female candidacies reflects the country's old themes: the perpetual dominance of the ruling NDP and the traditional, conservative role society has long envisioned for women.
