Soldiers patrols the lines of voters in Egypt who are participating in the first post-uprising elections on November 28, 2011. Egypt has been rocked by unrest over the last year., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.
December 1, 2011
http://detnews.com/article/20111201/NATION/112010392
Islamists on track to win dominant majority in Egyptian elections
Two groups could take 65% of seats amid huge turnout at the expense of liberal parties, activists
DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
New York Times
Cairo — Islamists claimed a decisive victory Wednesday as early election results put them on track to win a dominant majority in Egypt's first Parliament since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, the most significant step yet in the religious movement's rise since the start of the Arab Spring.
The party formed by the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's mainstream Islamist group, appeared to have taken about 40 percent of the vote, as expected. But a big surprise was the strong showing of ultraconservative Islamists, called Salafis, many of whom see most popular entertainment as sinful and reject women's participation in voting or public life.
Analysts in state-run media said early returns indicated that Salafi groups could take as much as quarter of the vote, giving the two groups of Islamists combined control of nearly 65 percent of the parliamentary seats.
That victory came at the expense of the liberal parties and youth activists who set off the revolution, affirming their fears that they would be unable to compete with Islamists who emerged from the Mubarak years organized and with an established following.
Poorly organized and internally divided, the liberal parties could not compete with Islamists disciplined by decades as the sole opposition to Mubarak.
"We were washed out," said Shady el-Ghazaly Harb, one of the most politically active of the group.
Although this week's voting took place in only a third of Egypt's provinces, they included some of the nation's most liberal precincts -— like Cairo, Port Said and the Red Sea coast — suggesting that the Islamist wave is likely to grow stronger as the voting moves into more conservative rural areas in the coming months.
The preliminary results extend the rising influence of Islamists across a region where they were once outlawed by autocrats aligned with the West. Islamists have formed governments in Tunisia and Morocco. They are positioned for a major role in post-Gadhafi Libya as well. But it is the victory in Egypt — the largest and once the most influential Arab state, a U.S. ally considered a linchpin of regional stability — that has the potential to upend the established order across the Middle East.
Results will not be final until January, after two more rounds of voting. And the ultimate scope of the new Parliament's power remains unclear because Egypt has remained under military rule since Mubarak resigned as president in February. But Parliament is expected to play a role in drafting a new constitution with the ruling military council, although the council has given contradictory indications about how much parliamentary input it will allow.
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