Atef Abdelnour enthusiastically went to the polling station in 2005 to vote for his candidate of choice. The candidate was not a member of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP). He was not an opposition party member either. But he was an independent. "More than 90 per cent of the voters in the constituency voted for this man," Abdelnour, a 55-year-old taxi driver, said. "Despite this, he didn't win the elections. It was a candidate from the NDP who won the elections instead although few people voted for him," he told the Egyptian Mail in an interview. Abdelnour has not counted the votes. Neither did he make sure that the NDP candidate got less votes than his favourite candidate. But the fact that his vote did not enable this candidate to win the election has made him decide not to go to the polling stations in any future elections. As he struggled to drive his old French Peugeot on one of the crowded streets of downtown Cairo, Abdelnour had a lot to say about the unimportance of elections in a country like Egypt, where one political party has stayed in power for more than a quarter of a century without any real competition. "Why should I bother to vote when everything is preset and planned by the Government?" he asked. "Elections are a waste of time. Some people benefit from these elections. I'm not one of them," he added. Abdelnour is one of 30 million Egyptians eligible to cast their votes in the upcoming Shura Council elections due on June 1. While polling stations prepare to receive the electorate, few on the streets of the most populous Arab country are ready to waste an hour or two to cast their votes in an election whose results, they say, are known to be in favour of the ruling party beforehand. "There's no real elections in this country," said Youssri el-Sayed, a civil servant who was buying a glass of cool mineral water from a kiosk in the centre of the city to quench his thirst in the shade away from the sizzling heat of the Egyptian capital. "There're things in life that are more important than wasting time in participating in a fake electoral process," he added. Voter apathy is not actually foreign to Egypt. Few of this country's polls have witnessed what can be termed as "high turnout". Although an amendment to the Constitution paved the way in 2005 for the first competitive presidential election in the history of this country, only 7 million people, out of a total of 34 million voters, showed up at the polling stations. The parliamentary elections that followed saw the same few numbers of voters heading to the polling stations, but they were marred by violence and vote-rigging that rendered the whole scene shameful. The congestion of cars on the street and the heat of the sun was more than Abdelnour, the taxi driver, could tolerate. Mentioning the elections in front of him seemed to re-open an old wound. He had worked as a truck driver in several Arab countries for years before he decided to settle down permanently in his home country, Egypt, two years ago. "Coming back to Egypt was my biggest mistake," he said. "This country goes from bad to worse day after day," he added. The whole of Egypt seemed to be in protest in front of him. Outside the Parliament, where he was trying to evade traffic in the centre of the Egyptian capital, hundreds of workers sat in and chanted slogans against the Government. He seemed to have no time to sympathise with the striking workers. He moved ahead, but produced a sigh of anger. "These workers have been in this place for days now," he said as he threaded his way past the workers. "None from the Parliament cared to show support to them. Why should we vote for these people then?" he asked.
