Egypt awaited Friday the delayed publication of results for the opening phase of its first post-revolution election, with the rise of hardline Islamists causing unease among the liberal elite. The date for results has been pushed back twice from their initially scheduled time of Wednesday evening, with the delay blamed on high turnout estimated at above 70 percent in Monday and Tuesday’s vote.
Two demonstrations were also called on Friday — one against the army leaders overseeing the country’s promised transition to democracy and another to support the regime — but turnout was low by recent standards. Millions of Egyptians embraced their new democratic freedoms this week in Cairo and second-city Alexandria in the first election vote since the toppling of the 30-year rule of Hosni Mubarak in February The results at 1800 GMT are expected to show the Muslim Brotherhood, a moderate Islamist movement banned for decades by Mubarak, as the dominant force after it said its party had taken at least 40 percent.
Hardline Islamists who follow the strict Salafi brand of Islam are expected to have beaten secular liberals for second place and could emerge with as much as 20 percent of the vote, according to local media projections. The results are for only the first part of a parliamentary election taking place in three stages, but the results will reveal the political trends that will shape a country that has not had a free vote in 60 years. Only a third of constituencies voted on Monday and Tuesday in the election for a new lower house of parliament. The rest of the country will follow on December 14 and then on January 3. The prospect of an Islamist-dominated parliament raises fears among liberals about civil liberties, religious freedom in a country with the Middle East’s largest Christian minority, and tolerance of multi-party democracy.
“My father is seriously thinking about sending me and my brothers elsewhere because he thinks we won’t have a future in the country with the Salafis,” Nardine, a Christian banker in her twenties, told AFP. A leading Salafi candidate to be the next president, Hazem Abu Ismail, aired his hardline views on society and religion in a television interview on Thursday evening. Asked if he would allow his son to marry an unveiled woman, he replied: “I would tell him not to marry her…
All Muslim women want to be veiled, but those who are not simply haven’t had the strength.”
