Authoritarianism 101: Egypt Parliamentary Elections

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You’re listening to Authoritarianism 101, part of the #AHRSyllabus project, produced by the American Historical Review.

Syrus Solo Jin
In this episode: Why do elections in authoritarian regimes matter? Historian Mona El-Ghobashy discusses the 2005 general elections in Egypt and the lengths that some voters went to cast their ballot.

Mona El-Ghobashy
When we hear the word authoritarianism, the first image that comes to mind is a single leader ruling over a country with an iron fist. And that may have been accurate after World War II, but in countries that are very, very complex, like Egypt, and most other countries that I can think of, authoritarianism has evolved over time. And not only has it evolved over time, but this may sound kind of paradoxical, but they actually do hold elections. But here’s the trick. They want the form of elections without the content. They want the optics of having Election Day, and lots of voters out with banners, and they do want the images of voters queuing up on voting stations, and smiling, and dipping their fingers in indelible ink and saying, “I voted.” They especially want a lot of women voters to make it seem as if the regime is very inclusive. They want young people. But the trick is, how do you get all of those optics without the content of actual competition? And that’s where most of our studies on elections under authoritarianism focus. How is it possible to have the optics of elections without the substance and the content of elections?

My name is Mona El Gabashy. I am a clinical associate professor of Liberal Studies at New York University, and my specialty is Middle East politics. I teach courses on Middle East history, revolutions, protests, and the great books.

The Egypt that I study looks very similar to many other countries around the globe, both in Sub Saharan Africa, but also in what is now called West Asia, which is part of the region in which Egypt sits, and it happens to be the most populous country today in the Middle East and North Africa, with over 100 million people. It has always been historically pretty significant, because it’s both in Asia and Africa. And most people, when they think of modern Egypt, they think of the Suez Canal, which was built in 1869 and, of course, that connects the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. So ever since 1869, historically, Egypt has become this very central place. Globally, the Suez controls something like 15% of global trade to this day. Hosni Mubarak, he was the president of Egypt for exactly 30 years before he was toppled by a popular uprising in 2011. Mubarak became president when his predecessor, Anwar Sadat, which many people may have heard of, he was assassinated in 1981 and Mubarak was his vice president. And at first, a lot of people welcomed his presidency because it was a period of calm after a very turbulent presidency under his predecessor. But then, like many presidents, both in Egyptian history, but in many other parts of the world, in Sub Saharan Africa and the Middle East, they became presidents for life.

News report
Since taking over from the assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has run his country with what amounts to a one party system and emergency rule.

Mona El-Ghobashy
They changed the constitution to abolish term limits, and they put themselves up for stage-managed elections every six years. And that’s what Mubarak did. But 2005 was going to be different, because at the beginning of the year, at that point, he had already been in power for 24 years, and then he announced something in February 2005 that caused a lot of attention to be put on Egypt.

New report
Later that month, Mubarak stunned his supporters by calling for the first multiparty direct presidential election in Egypt’s history.

Mona El-Ghobashy
He announced that there would be a slight shift in presidential elections, and it would be open to multiple candidates, and voters could go directly to the polls instead of voting indirectly. So already, even though many, many Egyptians realized that that doesn’t mean that Mubarak was going to leave office, it meant that, for the first time, there was going to be some competition in these new elections. So all of a sudden, lots of civil society organizations sprang up. One of them was called “We Are Watching You.” It was an election monitoring organization that was founded by many civil society activists, including feminist activists, and they began mobilizing to get ready to both field candidates, but also to monitor the vote on the ground, to make sure that they were going to document everything, including any particular rigging that might happen. So the thing to remember about modern authoritarianism is it doesn’t ban so much as manage. They’re very media savvy. They know that it would look really, really bad to have images of people being beaten up on the streets, or to have images of 99% of the people voting for the president. That just looks laughable. What was different about the 2005 elections was that first they had to entail, given that there was a rule change, there had to be a referendum on the constitution. So in addition to the presidential elections, there had to be a referendum on the constitution. And then last, but certainly not least, it just so happened that in the electoral calendar, general elections to the parliament were also going to happen in 2005. Not only were they going to have one election, now, they had three on their hands. So the question was, how are we going to game this now? How are we going to get what we want out of it, which is to make it seem like a big celebratory festival in which the president is opening himself up to public competition and then he emerges triumphant? Remember, they want the form of elections, but they don’t want the content.

News report
This crowd of several thousands has been waiting for President Mubarak for hours in a huge tent outside a cement factory. They’re eager to see their leader of nearly two and a half decades come and ask for their vote for the first time. When the president finally appears in a gray suit, without necktie, he gets an adoring reception.

Mona El-Ghobashy
At the same time, the opposition is also very mobilized. They’re very media savvy. That’s why everyone ever since the announcement of multiple candidates for the elections, everyone was focusing on Egypt that entire year.

New Report
One of the higher profile challengers is Ayman Nour of the new El Ghad Party. Nour is a soft spoken, bespectacled lawmaker who was thrust into the spotlight when the authorities arrested him on forgery charges that he says are false and politically motivated. Election officials insist everything will be above board, but so far, they won’t agree to international observers, despite complaints by hundreds of Egyptian judges slated to monitor the voting.

Mona El-Ghobashy
So people understood, these elections are not about voting out the president. But here’s what we’re going to do, and this is what makes elections so fascinating. Theyare going to be an opportunity for us, the opposition, to show the government and to show international public opinion that we know that this is kind of a facade, and we’re going to turn it into a test case of our strength and our commitment as an opposition. Predictably, Mubarak, the incumbent president, won, but here’s the slight difference: he won with 88% of the vote, so not 99.9% as it used to be in the olden days. But the other thing that was fascinating was that the second top vote getter was a young opposition politician. He was 41 years old. He was actually supported by the US government. His name was Ayman Noor, and he led a really kind of long shot campaign, but it was very feisty. So the takeaway from the 2005 presidential election was yes, Mubarak won. No surprise. But here’s this young, dynamic, 40 something politician who was willing to challenge Mubarak for it. By the way, FYI, this will not surprise a lot of people, soon after, a few months after this election, Ayman Noor, the opposition candidate, was tried on trumped up charges, and he was imprisoned for a five year term as punishment for standing up to the incumbent president. The important elections, though, were the ones that were coming up at the end of the year, and that’s what concerns my module, the general elections for Parliament.

New report
It was the third round of parliamentary elections. President Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party has been leading, but the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood has been running a strong second, so strong, they say, that the government is trying to block them from winning more seats.

Mona El-Ghobashy
There was a lot of police violence. Police blocked the streets to prevent people from getting to polling stations, and if people happened to be able to enter, they also blocked the schools where voting was happening.

News report
There was a polling station there at a local school, and it was one of many polling stations today that were actually shut down completely by the State Security Police who formed a cordon around the entire area and blocked voters from entering after I think the polls are open, people told us, for about an hour and a half in the morning and then just completely shut down for the rest of the day.

News report
And there was one death that day.

News report
A man was killed in a place called Khefer Shiyef, where opposition protesters were confronting police, and there was a scuffle, and the man was shot.

Mona El-Ghobashy
So here’s what voters did, and this is why it was extraordinary. They somehow rustled up rickety ladders. They went through the back streets, they put up the ladders, and then they organized a system where voters literally climbed up rickety ladders and entered the polling station through windows. There were elderly voters who climbed up these rickety ladders, and it was all captured by international media. Why do this? Why are voters going through so much personal risk to the point of potentially losing their life to cast a vote? And here’s the most important thing for people to know. They understood that if they made it through the police cordons, if they made it through all the violence, there were judges inside the polling station who had already signaled their commitment to count everyone’s vote. So voters here, if you keep that in mind, it actually makes a lot of sense. It’s still risky. But voters made a calculated decision. They said, if we go and if we enter, even if we enter through rickety ladders and get through the windows, there’s a very good chance that our vote will be counted and we will send a message to the government that we’re not intimidated, and that even though we know the election may not bring in the people we want, we still sent a message to the government about our commitment and our fearlessness. This was repeated over and over and over again. It was repeated in many election districts. What ends up happening is that for the first time in modern Egyptian history, 27% of the seats in parliament went to the opposition, meaning that the judges were good on their word and actually did count the ballots and the government could do nothing about it once the voters got into the polling station and cast their vote for an opposition candidate. 27% of a legislature that has 444 seats—doesn’t sound like a lot, but getting 27% of the seats, largest number of opposition share of the seats since 1976, that was also headline grabbing news. This was such bad optics, but after this election, it’s too risky to say, let’s scrap elections altogether. First of all, in order to get any kind of loans from the IMF and the World Bank, those loans have to be approved by a parliament. So you can’t just say, well, I’m just going to scrap the elections in parliament. Second thing is Egypt is a major US ally. It would look very, very bad for the US administration to acknowledge that they support an authoritarian government that holds no elections. But because these governments are also very clever and creative, they selected two judges. They kind of handpicked them and made an example out of them, and tried to put them on trial, to censure them for being involved in politics. That was the charge. Next, there were upcoming municipal elections. The government feared, rightly, that a lot of people would then crash all the polling stations and try to get in. So the government did what it could, which is delay them for two years. And in that two years, the government waged an extraordinarily offensive counter campaign, arresting opposition candidates, changing all the rules, making sure that elections are safe for authoritarianism, so that what happened in 2005 doesn’t happen again. And they did this last but not least, in the next cycle of parliamentary elections in 2010, and the rigging was so terrible that many scholars now with hindsight look back at that rigged election as the cause of the popular uprising that ultimately unseated and toppled Mubarak in February 2011. When I saw what happened in 2005, I was in the United States teaching, I decided that I would schedule my travel so that I would be there for 2010, and I indeed was there at a district in which we were tear gassed. And I saw, again, another round of the bravery of people. In my particular district that I observed there weren’t ladders, but what there were were people blocking the highway as a form of protest.So here’s the takeaway: Remember how we think of authoritarianism as a single person controlling each and every aspect of the government? And there is a grain of truth to that. But the thing that I think is very important to understand is that no government, no matter how powerful, can ever achieve 100% control, especially at moments of contestation, like elections. They become moments of open struggle, because it’s not easy to rig elections, and governments are going to go to great lengths to try to frame it as an open contest. But oppositions are also going to frame it for their own ends. So I’m always looking anywhere around the world that there are elections, whether democratic, but especially if they’re authoritarianism, I want to look for these signs of contestation, resistance, opposition, boycotts. All of that stuff has become part of our modern world. So elections under authoritarianism, they’re not a farce. Actually, they have become a moment of open struggle between society’s oppositions and the governments that rule them.

Syrus Solo Jin
This episode was produced by Syrus Jin and Daniel Story for Authoritarianism 101, part of the American Historical Review’s #AHR Syllabus project. For more info and additional resources, visit historians.org/a101.