Mohamed, my friend and ex-Muslim Brotherhood member, left Cairo two weeks ago for his hometown Damietta. He is going to be there for a month and a half, and he hopes to come back to Cairo in the beginning of November as a newly-elected member of the Egyptian Parliament. If his party, the “Egyptian Movement” (it makes sense in Arabic), wins 60% of the votes in his electoral district, Mohamed will win a spot in the first Egyptian Parliament in the post-Mubarak era.
Before he left, I had a chance to sit down with Mohamed for an extended chat about his political ambitions and platform at one of Cairo’s many cafes nestled in a downtown alley. Before discussing his election campaign, Mohamed first laid out the basics of the electoral system in Damietta. As he described it, his party is competing primarily with a party composed of former Mubarak supporters (known in Arabic “falul” – the remnants). The residents of Damietta will be voting on two separate ballots: one is a party-list system, in which voters vote for a specific party which is then allocated a number of seats in Parliament proportional to the percentage of votes it receives. The other is for independent candidates, running without a party affiliation, whom the voters choose based on their individual merits. Mohamed is running on a party-list, and he is ranked fifth out of eight candidates on the Egyptian Movement’s party list (Damietta will have eight party-list seats, so if a party won 50% of the votes, for example, its top four candidates would earn seats in Parliament). If you find this system unnecessarily confusing, you are not alone – there has been a lot of griping over the past few months about the complexity of the electoral system and its vulnerability to fraud.
Mohamed began describing his platform with a simple statement: “I am running in order represent the interests of Damietta’s youth.” Before diving into his views on specific political or economic issues, Mohamed detailed his plan to revamp Damietta’s educational system, which he considers one of his core issues. Arising from the belief that the education system fundamentally sells Egypt’s youth short and inculcates them with useless information through its emphasis on rote memorization, Mohamed wants Damietta’s youth to take matters into their own hands. He plans to identify 300 of the brightest students in the area (“for their critical thinking skills, not their ability to score well on Egypt’s secondary school exit exam”) and provide them with six month scholarships to study education in Brazil or Malaysia. After learning about those countries’ educational systems, they would then return to Damietta and begin working in local schools as teaching assistants and administration advisers in an attempt to change the curriculum to better serve the students’ needs. At the same time, Mohamed wants to open a new high school for exceptionally smart students (50 per year) that would be modeled after the American educational system (read: critical thinking skills, hands-on learning, liberal-arts style breadth and depth).
In addition to his proposal for education reform, Mohamed also has a distinct economic philosophy that he describes as “socialist and centered around the needs of the poor.” Damietta is a large manufacturing center, and Mohamed commented that the many factory workers are all inclined to vote for candidates with socialist economic policies. He is calling for the Egyptian government to play a significant role in supporting certain industries with tax breaks and investment subsidies, while identifying others that it deems less essential and will thus tax stiffly. “How can Egypt export grain,” Mohamed queried, “when we have to import other food from abroad in order to feed our own people?”
On top of emphasizing domestic production and imposing stiffer government oversight on Egypt’s exports and imports, Mohamed plans to focus on ensuring that all of Egypt’s workers have a minimum wage of 50,000 Egyptian pounds (approximately $8,500) per year. Given that Egypt’s current GDP per capita is just under $3,000, that goal seems nearly impossible to reach in the near future. Suffice it to say that Mohamed’s economic plan, were it actually implemented, would represent a major shift away from the Mubarak regime’s efforts to promote liberal economic reform.
As to foreign policy, Mohamed declared that Egypt should emulate the Turkish “zero problems with neighbors” model. In his own words, Mohamed emphasized his belief that “dignity” should be a core concept of Egypt’s foreign policy: “If other countries respect us, we will certainly respect them.” Beyond the rhetoric, however, he did not go into many specifics. When I asked him about his position on Egypt’s relationship with Israel, he replied that he did not inherently oppose the idea of Israel as a Jewish state nor was he opposed to the idea of Egypt and Israel continuing their economic and diplomatic relations. He did say, however, that “as long as Israel continues to kill our soldiers [on the Sinai border] and Palestinian children, we cannot accept it as a legitimate partner.”
Taken as a whole, what is there to make of Mohamed’s policy positions? In my opinion, his platform as a whole seems high on rhetoric and low on substance. He is enthusiastic and full of ideas, but none of them seem to be grounded in a sober analysis of the political and economic realities in Egypt. Can the Egyptian government actually pay for any of the social programs he proposes? Would it be able to carry out a major realignment of the tax system? Will the Parliament be able to wrest any control over the country’s foreign policy away from the military? Mohamed, like many other candidates for Parliament, does not have any political experience. While he and his fellow Egyptians are bursting with enthusiasm at the prospect of what they hope will be the country’s first set of transparent democratic elections, no one is quite sure how that enthusiasm will translate into the reality of writing, passing, and implementing legislation.
In addition to that uncertainty, the elephant in the political room is, of course, the military. It remains as powerful as ever, and, as of yet, has not laid out a firm timetable for completing the transfer of power to a civilian government. In the battle for power between a Parliament filled with green politicians and a military council composed of experienced soldiers who have access to extensive financial resources and support from the behemoth that is Egypt’s security apparatus, it is hard to imagine that Mohamed or any of his peers will have much success carrying out their plans without the military’s approval.
For now, however, Mohamed has the luxury of ignoring the rocky road ahead. He left his job as a sales representative at a medical services company to focus on his election campaign. From now until election time, he will be doing what politicians do when they campaign: attending public events, meeting with voters, spreading his message as widely as possible. After we had finished our last cups of tea, I wished him good luck: “rabina yuafuqk!” – May God grant you success.
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