Election Season in Egypt

Catchy slogans, campaign rallies, seemingly sane and intelligent people making outrageous statements…it’s election season! The election I’m talking about, though, is not between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. No, this is presidential politics [cue the remix music] Egyptian style!

Last night, a few Egyptian friends and I attended a campaign rally held by the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) for their party leader-turned-presidential candidate Mohamed Morsy. Before diving into the details of the rally, I’ll provide a little background for those of you who have not been able to keep up with the circus that Egyptian politics has become of late. In an effort to assuage fears that the MB wanted to immediately establish an Islamic theocracy in Egypt, the group’s leaders pledged that they would only contest a portion of the seats in the parliamentary elections and would not, under any circumstances, field a presidential candidate.

Mohamed Morsy

They did not live up to either of those pledges. After fielding candidates in nearly every parliamentary district, the group announced about a month ago that they had reviewed their earlier pledge not to field a presidential candidate and decided that “new political developments” forced them to put forward one of their own for the presidency. The MB’s chosen candidate, Kheirat al-Shater, did not pass muster, however, in the eyes of the country’s electoral commission (which by most accounts was heavily influenced by the old regime and the ruling military council).  After Shater was disqualified from the race on what was essentially a technicality, the MB scrambled to put forward Mohamed Morsy as an alternative. He’s spent the past few weeks campaigning throughout the country, but from what I saw last night it’s easy to see why he didn’t get the nod in the beginning.

The rally was held at the Mosque of Amr Ibn al-As, reputedly Cairo’s oldest, in a working class neighborhood just south of the center of the city. While the rally was technically supposed to begin at 7:00 PM, we arrived at around 8:30 (most official events here run on “Egypt time,” meaning that they begin two to three hours after their supposed start time), just in time for evening prayers. As I sat in the mosque waiting for my friends to finish praying, an older man greeted me, declaring to me ,“I grew up in this mosque! I joined the brotherhood when I was this tall [making a gesture to indicate that he joined at a young age], I grew up a brother, and I will die a brother! Islam is always first!” Similar to most political rallies in the US, nearly all of the attendees seemed to be ardent MB supporters.

My friends completed their prayers, and we, along with hundreds of other men, spilled out of the mosque and onto the street in front of it where the rally was being held. A few words about the set-up of the event: the first thing that caught my eye was that the MB, apparently with an eye towards not causing a major traffic snarl by blocking off an entire street to hold the rally, had decided to put the stage and chairs on half the street, leave the other half open for traffic, and then put the spillover crowd on the opposite sidewalk! As a result, a steady stream of buses, trucks, and cars through the middle of the rally kept up throughout the night. Secondly, this was a gender-segregated rally. The chairs directly in front of the stage were occupied by men, and the sizable contingent of women were relegated to a spot on the sidewalk between the mosque and the stage (essentially at a 45 degree angle from the stage). When I asked my friend why the women didn’t have as good a view as the men did, he shrugged and said that it must be because they just ran out of space to fit them all in the front. I decided that it would be better not to press him on the issue.

As to the campaign rally itself, it actually bore somewhat of a resemblance to what you would expect at a campaign event in the US. Loud music (a mixture of Islamic and national songs), lots of flag-waving, campaign literature being distributed, etc. Morsy and his entourage didn’t arrive until about 9:30 (even presidential candidates get stuck in Cairo’s traffic), so the emcee led the crowd in a number of chants, such as “the people want Morsy to be president!” and “all the people call for Morsy to be the president of the country!” As the wait for him to arrive dragged on, I made up one of my own: “Where are you, oh Mohamed Morsy? I still can’t find a chair!” (all of those slogans rhyme in Arabic, by the way).

When Morsy finally showed up, everyone greeted him with whoops and cheers. Sitting next to him on the stage were a number of MB bigwigs, including Essam el-Erian (current MP and former member of the MB’s Guidance Bureau) and Safwat Hegazi, an outspoken imam and televangelist who has major street cred for being one of the first people to publicly come out in favor of the revolution in January of last year.

The first speaker of the night, however, was a woman (who also had a seat alongside Morsy). While I didn’t catch her name, she gave a ten minute speech about the special role of women in Islam, referring to the important role women played in the time of the prophet Mohamed and calling on the women in the audience to continue to work hard to make Egypt a more Islamic country. She yielded the floor to Essam el-Erian, who delivered a speech in impeccable formal Arabic that was long on flowing rhetoric and short on actual content. Perhaps the most rousing speech of the night was delivered by Hegazi, who drew a huge rise out of the crowd with his calls for the toppling of the ruling military council. He also drew another loud roar and a sustained period of slogan-chanting when he declared that the Egyptians would work with all Arabs to liberate Jerusalem. As a whole, however, the anti-Israel rhetoric that is so common on the Egyptian street was largely absent from the night’s dialogue.

And then it was Morsy’s turn. Like his colleague el-Erian (and unlike the other speakers), Morsy spoke exclusively in formal Arabic. He spent the first ten minutes of his speech touching on broad, nationalist themes, which included the idea of a “national renaissance,” and he spoke in general terms about the need to harness Egypt’s resources and the power of Egyptian workers to bring about economic and social development. After those first ten minutes, however, most of the crowd was losing interest. Unlike the other speakers, Morsy spoke in a monotone and stood in place on the stage, not using any hand gestures or other rhetorical devices to drum up interest in what he had to say. That being said, what happened next was absolutely shocking. The emcee, who had been silent throughout the previous speeches, suddenly interrupted Morsy when he was in the middle of a sentence and started shouting into the microphone “the people want Morsy for president!”, to which the crowd half-heartedly responded in kind. Morsy went on to drone on for another ten minutes, but the closest he got to laying out any kind of specific program was to say that he had convened a meeting of Very Smart People to study all of the problems that Egypt currently faces and come up with solutions. What exactly those problems are or what solutions he might be promoting are still unclear. Twenty minutes into his speech, el-Erian seemed to be dozing off in his chair next to Morsy, and a shouting match broke out on the street next to the stage which led a large portion of the crowd to take their waning attention off of Morsi and flock toward the bickerers. The emcee, again unprompted, broke in with more slogans just as Morsy was in the middle of explaining how Egypt’s foreign relations must be based on “mutual respect and shared interests.”

It was just that kind of night for Morsy. Since this was the first time I’ve seen him in person, I can’t say whether he was having a bad night or whether this is just who he is. I suspect, however, that the latter is true. Morsy wasn’t the MB’s first choice, he is not very well known outside of MB and political circles, and he doesn’t have the charisma and presence that you would expect in a presidential candidate. Despite the fact that the MB won 40% of the seats in Parliament, the latest opinion poll (which, admittedly, is of questionable reliability) had his level of support at just 3.6%! While there are still a few weeks to go before the first round of the elections, Morsy faces a Herculean task if he is to win one of the top two spots to advance to the runoff in June.

While most of the attendees at the rally were diehard MB supporters, the three friends who came with me left unconvinced. Riding the subway home, I asked them what they thought of the rally. “I’m still undecided,” my friend Mohamed said, “but I’m definitely not voting for that guy!”