Living in the Palm of a Ghost

After spending nearly a full year in Egypt, I am about to bid the country farewell. This time next week I will be in San Francisco enjoying a combination of food, baseball, and fog – a far cry from the oppressive desert heat of the Cairo summer. Before leaving, however, I, along with 85 million Egyptians, am about to witness this country’s first ever competitive presidential election. Voting will commence on Wednesday morning and extend through Thursday evening, with the results to be announced soon thereafter. While this is only the first round (the top two vote recipients will face off in a runoff election on June 17^th and 18^th), the excitement and anticipation in the country are palpable. As my Egyptian dialect teacher told me last week, “we are living in the palm of a ghost [an Egyptian saying meaning that everything is very tenuous, nothing is for certain], no one knows what to expect!”

Indeed, the outcome of this first round is going to be as close to a complete surprise as possible. There are no reliable public opinion polls in Egypt, and, while most people have a general sense that the election is going to be between four main candidates (Amr Moussa, former Minister of Foreign Affairs and head of the Arab League, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi, former MB member turned liberal and Salafi favorite Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, and Mubarak crony and former Minister of Civil Aviation Ahmed Shafik), it is anybody’s guess as to who will make it into the runoff.

Whatever the outcome, Egyptians have thrown themselves into this campaign season with unmatched fervor. Literally every time I walk down the street past a café or overhear discussions in public areas, the subject is always politics! Taxi drivers love to expound on their reasons for voting for one candidate or another, and the newspapers and television talk shows are full of stories about the candidates and the campaign. These past two days have been deemed a “media blackout,” but that has done little to dampen the debate. When I told a friend of mine that I thought the blackout was a ridiculous idea, he responded “Don’t worry, Egyptians are naturally absurd like this: when there is a curfew we go down to the street to see what’s happening, and when there’s a strike we stay home instead of going to protest, so of course when there’s a media blackout everyone will just talk about politics more!”

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had a chance to see all of the main candidates in person. I wrote about the Mohamed Morsi rally I attended here, I heard Moussa and Shafik speak at luncheons held by the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt (where I have been interning for the past few months), and I attended a political rally-cum-festival last weekend held by the Aboul Fotouh campaign.

Like Morsi, Moussa had very little charisma and his rhetorical style was what I imagine Professor Binns (the “History of Magic” professor in the Harry Potter books known for his endless droning) would sound like. Nevertheless, Moussa has turned out to be highly popular because of his long tenure in government (which he has diligently tried to portray as endowing him with experience rather than associating him with the Mubarak regime). He is the John McCain equivalent in this race – old, a known entity, and running on his long record of civil service.

Shafik, on the other hand, is making no bones about his connection to the old regime. At the AmCham luncheon he made his distaste for the revolution clear, speaking of the “huge crisis” that Egypt was currently facing as a result of doing away with Mubarak. Shafik is running on a security and stability platform, claiming that security will return in “100 days – maximum!” if he becomes president, and there is little doubt that he plans to achieve that goal by letting the police force loose as Mubarak used to do and allowing it to round up anyone and everyone it so desires. Like Mubarak, Shafik is also fiercely opposed to the Islamists and hinted that he would take steps to push them out of politics (primarily by instituting a presidential system and effectively stripping the Parliament of its power). As you might expect, many of the revolutionaries are apopleptic at the possibility of a Shafik presidency. A friend of mine told me that if Shafik wins, he and all of his friends would go down to Tahrir Square with only two possible outcomes in mind: “Either we overthrow him, or he kills us. I would rather die than live in an Egypt where Ahmed Shafik is president.” Despite that fervor, however, I have met a surprisingly large number of people who plan to vote for Shafik.

And finally, we come to Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, the closest thing to Obama that Egypt has to offer. Fotouh was a longtime Muslim Brotherhood member, although he was from a decidedly more liberal wing of the brotherhood than Mohamed Morsi. Soon after the revolution, he split off from the group in order to run for the presidency, taking a large chunk of the MB youth with him. Since then, he has assembled a coalition of youth who see him as the most revolutionary candidate, liberals who see him as a pseudo-liberal candidate who has a realistic chance of winning, and Salafis who like that he comes from an Islamist background and don’t want the MB to control both the parliament and the presidency. A true “big tent” campaign. As expected, Aboul Fotouh has been accused of pandering to the different constituencies supporting him, and many liberal and Christian friends are also highly suspicious of his history in the MB (“once a brother, always a brother” is a common refrain). Nonetheless, Aboul Fotouh seems to have been steadily rising in popularity, and the rally I went to last weekend was well attended. In classic Aboul Fotouh form, he stated in his speech that he wanted to create a “civil democratic state built upon a civilized Islamic foundation” - every word in that sentence, of course, was targeted at a particular constituency.

Unlike the parliamentary elections, which hinged much more on a candidate’s local ties and reputation in a particular community, the presidential elections are going to be the first real indicator of the overall political mood in the country. At the same time, however, these elections are certainly not an end in and of themselves. Whoever takes power will inherit an Egypt that still does not have a coherent governing framework, is plagued by the military’s “state within a state” of economic and security interests, and currently faces a huge economic and budgetary crisis. For now, though, it’s time to let the voting party begin!

Finally, here's my off-the-cuff prediction for the first ever competitive presidential elections in Egypt's history:

1) Amr Moussa

2) Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh

3) Ahmed Shafik

4) Mohamed Morsi

           

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!”

Election Season Begins in Egypt

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.