Mubarak's party expected to win Egypt polls

By Alistair Lyon

CAIRO (Reuters): Egypt's parliamentary elections, to be launched by presidential decree on Sunday, may see less thuggery and vote-rigging than previous ones, but analysts say President Hosni Mubarak's ruling party is certain to win anyway.

The National Democratic Party (NDP), which holds 94 percent of the seats in the 444-member People's Assembly, faces no significant challenge from stunted, fractious opposition parties. Islamist groups are banned from taking part.

Democracy in Egypt, whose people have been accustomed to authoritarian rule since the age of the Pharaohs, is often more form than substance and analysts said the latest elections could at best offer a marginal improvement over the previous ones.

Egypt last held parliamentary elections in 1995.

"The election process is not fully fledged, it is not normal," said a senior European diplomat. "Egypt's prime consideration is stability, but if you want economic development, you need political development."

Mubarak, who won a fourth six-year term as sole candidate in a referendum a year ago, has called for the parliamentary elections to be free and fair, urging Egyptians to vote.

The government has chosen an unwieldy formula of voting in three, drawn-out stages in October and November to enable judges to supervise polling across the country of 65 million.

The judiciary has a reputation for independence, partly because after the last election the Supreme Court declared the 1995 parliament and its two predecessors unconstitutional because of rigging. Parliament ignored the decisions.

Human rights activist Hisham Kassem said the judges should ensure more orderly voting procedures than in the deeply flawed 1995 election, but saw a "dangerous loophole" in a rule letting anyone vote without showing an identity card if recognized at the polling station by the representative of any candidate.

He argued that pre-election pressures could prejudice the outcome if the NDP used its clout and its control of the media to stifle opponents, as it has done in the past.

"You can't be under-secretary at a ministry and run for the opposition Wafd party without terminating your career," he said. "As an opposition politician, your chances of providing services to your constituents are nil. Only the NDP can do that."

The Wafd won six seats in 1995, among 13 gained by opposition parties, which had boycotted the previous election in 1990. In the 1987 election, opposition candidates won 31 percent of seats, roughly twice the tally in 1984 polls.

Saddeddin Ibrahim, a sociology professor trying to organize independent monitoring of the elections, said the opposition gains of the 1980s had encouraged NDP figures to "frighten Mubarak with the specter of not having a two-thirds NDP majority, which he needs to be nominated for the presidency".

This had led to blatant vote-rigging in 1990 and especially 1995, when dozens of people were killed in election violence.

Ibrahim said judicial supervision made him more confident this poll would be less disreputable. But he said many Egyptians detected anger and frustration akin to the atmosphere prevailing shortly before President Anwar Sadat's 1981 assassination.

"If there is no fairness in the elections, there will be violence," he predicted. Ibrahim, 61, was recently detained and accused of defaming Egypt. The dual U.S.-Egyptian citizen says this was a government bid to disrupt election monitoring.

As usual, Egypt's Islamists will be the ghosts at the election banquet.

The Muslim Brotherhood, the biggest fundamentalist group, is banned. Over 200 suspected members have been detained this year.

The Brotherhood had an informal alliance with the small Labour Party, but a June court order to suspend the party and keep its newspaper al-Shaab off the streets blocked that outlet.

Al-Shaab editor Adel Hussein told Reuters the fate of the Labour Party and its paper proved that elections could not be truly free and fair, even with judicial supervision.

He decried emergency laws in force since Sadat's killing, saying they tipped the scales against the opposition.

"We are used as a scapegoat or an excuse to maintain authoritarian rule. In Turkey, they exclude Islamists but participation is there for others. Here everyone is ordered to shut his mouth," Hussein declared.

Egypt may already be paying dearly for an ossified political system of top-heavy decision-making. The lack of accountability offers opportunities for cronyism and corruption, critics argue.

"Democracy has waited and the economy is going backwards. If you don't catch up politically, any economic gains will be wasted," said Ibrahim, citing the experience of southeast Asian countries before and after their 1998 financial crisis.

Many opponents of the government hold up the mega-projects launched in the 1990s, particularly the giant Toshka irrigation scheme in the south, as painful lessons in how resources can be wasted or misallocated when democracy malfunctions.

Egypt, a key to Middle East diplomacy since it signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, could no longer count on being accepted as the Arab world's natural leader, especially if an overall regional settlement finally emerges, Ibrahim said.

"We are entering the post-peace period and if Egypt doesn't have something to show as a regional model, its hope for continued leadership and influence will decline," he contended.