Islamists sweep early results in Egypt election

Early results from Egypt’s first post-revolution election showed Islamist parties sweeping to victory, including hardline Salafists, with secular parties trounced in many areas.
Partial figures trickled in for the areas of the country that voted in record numbers on Monday and Tuesday, confirming earlier predictions that Islamist parties would win at least two thirds of the ballots cast. In northern Port Said, the moderate Islamist alliance led by the previously banned Muslim Brotherhood triumphed with 32.5 percent of votes for parties, while the hardline Al-Nur party gained 20.7 percent, the Al-Ahram daily said. The liberal Wafd party won 14 percent, while another Islamist party, Al-Wassat which advocates a strict interpretation of Islamic law, recorded 12.9 percent, according to the state-run newspaper. In the southern Red Sea district, the Brotherhood’s alliance won 30 percent, while secular coalition the Egyptian Bloc came in second with 15 percent, it said.
Full results after the first voting – which saw 62 percent turnout – were initially meant to have been published on Wednesday but have been delayed several times. There appeared few bright spots for the liberal secular movement which played a key role in the overthrow of the 30-year rule of Hosni Mubarak in February after an 18-day uprising. It has since splintered and been outgunned by the more organised Brotherhood, well known to Egyptians because of its decades of opposition to the Mubarak regime and its extensive charitable and social work.
Mohammed Abdel Ghani, a liberal candidate, told the independent Al-Shorouq newspaper that his movement needed to counter Islamist propaganda that “non-Islamist candidates were infidels”. In Cairo, the rising star of the movement, Amr Hemzawi, won a seat in the upmarket Heliopolis district, but elsewhere leading figures of the revolution were either struggling or had been beaten. In Tahrir Square, the epicentre of protests against Mubarak, demonstrators returned last week to protest against the military rulers who took over when the strongman quit, but their numbers had dwindled to a few hundred on Saturday.
“Everyone that we had faith in has betrayed us,” 25-year-old protester Mohammed El-Assas told AFP. According to independent daily Al-Masri Al-Yum, no women were elected in the first round, with television presenter Gamila Ismail, actress Tayssir Fahmi and Wafd candidate Nihal Aahdi all eliminated. Aahdi told the paper that the failure of women candidates was because “religious parties dominate Egyptian society and the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists dominated the results”. It was only the opening phase of a parliamentary election that is taking place in three stages, but the returns reveal the political trends that will shape the country’s transition to democracy.