Muhammad Tries to Vote

“I wish we had elections every day,” he says. It’s 4:30, usually the height of Cairo rush-hour traffic, but we’re cruising easily through the city. Muhammad figures the government offices all emptied early when employees were bused en masse to polling places throughout the city. As a reward for performing their duty, presumably by voting for their employer to keep his job, they all got to go home early, so while the streets aren’t exactly empty, it’s strangely quiet. And for once, life in Cairo–a city of 18 million that’s short on all sorts of space, personal, social, economic, and political–seems manageable.

But this being Egypt, it has not been an easy day. Muhammad had his wallet stolen a few weeks ago and so he doesn’t have his voter ID card. Many Egyptians are in the same boat, having failed to register by the January deadline. If the nation’s 32 million eligible voters had known that the September presidential election would not merely be a referendum rubber-stamping Mubarak’s fifth six-year term, they might well have signed up in large numbers. But since it wasn’t until March that the president asked for Article 76 of the Constitution to be amended, allowing direct multicandidate elections for the first time in Egypt’s history, only a fraction of those eligible are registered. Voter turnout is so low that Muhammad is at leisure to search through dozens of lists for his name. Unfortunately for him, the register is ordered alphabetically by first name, and virtually every Egyptian family has at least one son named Muhammad.

Soon we’re directed to a second polling place where we run into Sherif, a childhood friend of Muhammad’s who is working as an election monitor. Sherif notes a few irregularities: Some National Democratic party functionaries are pamphleteering for Mubarak without properly identifying that they work for the ruling party; and, bizarrely, one of the presidential candidates came to this polling station to cast his vote and couldn’t find his name on the register. He screamed loud and long enough, so the error was eventually corrected. Still, Sherif is generally pleased. “The police have been very professional, and they’re respectful of my role here as a monitor.”

While much of the foreign press has taken a dim view of the September 7 vote, the State Department is right to call it a “beginning . . . that will enrich the Egyptian political dialogue for years to come.” The elections represent a fairly strong trial run for the country’s nascent democratic process. The problems with the elections were largely technical and organizational. As one American researcher and longtime resident of Egypt put it: “The government wasn’t prepared to hold a presidential election, which was of course intentional. Moreover, the ruling party is at a huge advantage in organizational terms. They didn’t really rig the election, but the NDP is the only party capable of mobilization like that.”

It wasn’t just the participation of other parties that made a difference this time out, but what those parties stood for. “Ayman Nour and the Ghad party gave the elections weight,” says Hala Mustafa, an analyst at the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies and editor in chief of the quarterly journal Al-Dimuqratiya. “It’s the first time a liberal party has been represented since 1952. The Ghad represents something fresh, a new generation of thought.”

Elections have a certain momentum of their own, but democracy activists here and ordinary Egyptians are rolling this stone up an awfully steep hill. Mubarak has been in power 24 years; political life is still largely shaped by the same Arab nationalist rhetoric that brought Gamal Abdel Nasser to power 53 years ago; and for over 80 years, Egyptians and foreigners alike have been debating whether or not Egyptians were even capable of democracy.

The argument against popular political participation hasn’t changed much over the last century: The masses of Egyptians are so poorly educated–illiteracy here is at least 40 percent–that they are easy marks for the ruling elite, whose corruption would yet increase the gap between rich and poor. Of course, even without democracy, the ruling classes have succeeded in keeping the poor and illiterate in their place and, moreover, ravaged the country’s middle classes. And it’s that enraged middle class that’s added yet another layer to the argument against Egyptian democracy: Given the choice, under-and unemployed young men are most likely to cast their votes for Egypt’s outlawed, and ostensibly very popular, Muslim Brotherhood.

Muhammad, a philosophy graduate from Cairo University, is certainly underemployed. His first two months as a journalist, he worked for free and then got bumped up to $40 a month. Though he’s contributed some of his time to working with Islamist charities, he’s hardly in danger of becoming an Islamist activist, never mind a militant. One of his ambitions in life is to translate all of Kant into Arabic. He is not sure whether the reform-minded Kifaya (Enough) movement should have allied itself with the Muslim Brotherhood. “At one of their rallies, they had a few hundred people chanting ‘Kifaya Mubarak,’ and then the much more numerous Brothers drowned them out with ‘Allahu Akbar.’ A lot of the people who were stuck in traffic because of the rally just honked their horns because they wanted to get home.” Maybe that impatience is an indication of political complacency, but maybe it suggests that the Egyptians are by and large pragmatists who want food on their plates, a safe place to live, and are not predisposed to ideological extremes.

“If you were to get rid of the regime-sponsored anti-America, anti-Israel incitement in the media,” says Mustafa, “you’d see that the Egyptians are not highly politicized.”

Perhaps that’s why Mubarak’s costly media campaign was aimed over the heads of ordinary Egyptians and towards another audience entirely. The Mubarak wearing an easy smile and pancake make-up in the slickly produced video ads is not an authoritarian ruler, but a man in an open-necked collar who joshes easily with the press; this Mubarak is not a president-for-life surrounded by corrupt regime hands, but a man at ease with the Egyptian peasantry in all their folkloric splendor; this Mubarak is not an Arab strongman whose decisions consist of winks and nods, but a commander in chief who sits behind a desk and–Saddam will love this one!–signs his name to official papers.

This campaign was for Western consumption, the United States in particular, and it wasn’t promoting Mubarak’s accomplishments, of which there are few to boast. Rather, the regime is campaigning for Mubarak’s 42-year-old Westernized son Gamal to be allowed one day to inherit the presidency. Presumably, the United States will not object too strongly so long as Egypt accomplishes a certain amount of reform before the succession. The catch is that the Mubarak regime has significant leverage of its own.

Insofar as the Bush administration interprets its Middle East policy in terms of the global war on terror, the White House is correct to be concerned about Islamist groups. What’s less clear, however, is why so many in Washington now believe that it is important for Arab states to integrate their Islamist groups into the political process. The argument runs that incorporating Islamists will keep potential moderates from becoming violent extremists, while also moderating those who are already extreme.

Whether or not entry into the realm of real politics actually tempers ideological fanatics–and there is plenty of evidence in the Arab world and elsewhere that it does not–Egypt is willing to use this line of thought to its advantage. Yes, the regime concurs, Islamists should be brought into the political process to moderate them–and it just so happens that this is precisely what Gamal plans on doing. Egypt has long played the Islamist card against U.S. administrations, but this is taking jihadist poker to a level of gamesmanship that must have the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia drooling with envy.

It is a common misperception that Arab regimes and their Islamist opponents are sworn ideological enemies. It is perhaps more appropriate to think of them in Biblical terms, as brothers with slightly different temperaments who are fighting for a limited resource, power. This is especially the case in Egypt, where both parties’ anti-American and anti-Israel rhetoric has dominated political discourse for over 50 years. Islamists have always been a part of the political process here, a sort of bipartisan dynamic that has allowed Egypt to foreclose any other possible alternatives to the regime’s Arab nationalism.

“The regime looks at the liberals as their real rivals, which is why it doesn’t give them any chance to grow,” says Hala Mustafa. “By nature, they can include a host of political trends, even the Islamists, though on different terms. And liberals can communicate with the West, which also hurts the regime, since the regime insists that they are the only ones the West can talk to.”

Without Arab liberals, the Bush administration’s Middle East democratization program would have fallen on deaf ears, and it was they who, insofar as they were able, exerted internal pressure on the regimes. Washington can keep Mubarak’s feet to the fire by demanding he empower liberals, not by playing Bre’r Rabbit and asking him to integrate Islamists.

“The infrastructure of the regimes needs to be rearranged,” says Mustafa, “especially in the media. There has to be space for other voices, liberal voices, to be heard.”

As much as he tried, however, Muhammad wasn’t able to make his voice heard this time around. (When the votes were tallied, Mubarak won 89 percent of the vote on 23 percent turnout.) But he’ll have another chance in two months time to vote in parliamentary elections. If Mubarak is serious about the promises he’s made these last few weeks–promises that he should have fulfilled decades ago–then the November parliamentary elections are his first test in proving his accountability. The mechanisms for ensuring a free and honest election are now in place, and the Egyptian people, perhaps caught by surprise this time around, have shown that they want to express their various political opinions openly.

Lee Smith is writing a book on Arab culture.