2023-12-13 06:27:10
After three days of voting, Egypt concluded a presidential election in which, with almost complete certainty, the current president and former Marshal Abdel Fattah al Sisi will be re-elected for a third six-year term once the results are announced, expectedly the next day. 18.
In the absence of a real rivalry between the four candidates, observers and analysts point out that the only relevant data from these elections will be the participation rate and the percentage of Al Sisi’s victory, which has been reinforced by the threat of expansion of the war in the Gaza Strip.
Precisely these elections have been marked by the fear of a possible displacement of the Palestinians to Egypt, but also by the general discontent of the population in the face of the severe economic crisis that the country is going through, marked by an official inflation of almost 40% and the loss of more than half of the Egyptian pound.
And it is that when Al Sisi took the reins of the country in a coup d’état in 2013, the external debt accumulated to just over 43,000 million dollars, while now it exceeds 160,000 million due largely to the construction of megaprojects of infrastructure, something that has not gone unnoticed among Egyptians.
In fact, these elections were scheduled for 2024, but were brought forward in view of the severe and unpopular measures that the Government will have to take to alleviate the crisis and comply with the requirements of the International Monetary Fund.
“Our hands are tied, only God can intervene to solve this,” said Widad Mohamed, a 73-year-old woman from a polling station in the center of Cairo, while Sohia Gomaa, 70, said that Al Sisi “does not can solve the situation due to the accumulation of external debt.
“Unprecedented” participation
These elections are the first since Al Sisi came to power in which four candidates of different stripes competed, in a sign of the State’s “serious path towards democratic transformation, partisan pluralism and political competitiveness,” according to the authorities.
However, the other three candidates for the Presidency of Egypt are mostly unknown to the population, so participation has become the most important indicator of the process and the authorities themselves have made multiple calls to go to the polls.
So far, the National Electoral Authority (ANE) has placed participation at 45%, thus exceeding that of the 2018 elections (41%), in which the current president defeated a single rival with 97% of the votes. votes in a process considered a farce by the opposition and human rights organizations.
This year’s elections have not been without controversy either, since the observer teams of two of Al Sisi’s contenders assured that parties related to the president “bribed” people with money and food to go to the polling stations, among other things. of irregularities already recorded in previous elections.
“We expect a historic result never witnessed by Egypt that demonstrates the conscience of the citizen,” said the executive director of the ANE, Ahmed Bendari, at a press conference, who also stated that he had not received any complaints or registered any major irregularities during the three days of vote.
Al Sisi, the undisputed favorite
In 2017, the current president assured that he would only remain in power for two terms, but in 2019 he promoted a controversial reform of the Constitution to be able to remain in power until 2030, the year from which he will no longer be able to run in elections, in a principle.
According to organizations such as Amnesty International, the last decade in Egypt has been characterized by repression, while Human Rights Watch estimates that some 60,000 people have been detained for political reasons since Al Sisi came to power, including members of the opposition.
Likewise, several NGOs and opposition groups denounced this year a campaign against a popular candidate for the Presidency, who in the end had to withdraw from the electoral race due to “impediments” and after having been subjected to espionage by the Egyptian authorities.
But the war in Gaza has strengthened Al Sisi, the only candidate voted for by the dozens of people consulted during the three days of elections in Cairo.
“Egypt needs a person to defend it,” said Mahmoud Hasan, 50, from a polling station in Giza.
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