Egyptians have gone to the polls in large numbers this week to cast their votes in the first stage of protracted parliamentary elections that will stretch into early next year. Meanwhile, the country’s military rulers do not appear to be going anywhere, unless forced out by mounting street protests and outside international pressure.
Few of the hundreds of thousands of protesters who have crowded Tahrir Square in recent days would appear to trust the integrity of the electoral process, nor think it will mean greater freedom any time soon. One voter quoted by the New York Times captured the situation succinctly when he said, “It is like a play, it is like a sham. We are pretending to be voting. I know these elections don’t mean anything, but I am still going.” Another said, “There is no justice, no integrity, no confidence. But I came because then I will have done my duty, so I will ask to claim my rights.”
The main beneficiary of the elections will in all likelihood be the Muslim Brotherhood, whose leaders formed an alliance of convenience with the ruling military council to ensure that the elections would proceed as planned. The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest and best-organized political force, wanted no delays that would give opponents the opportunity to catch up with its organizational prowess.
We got a taste of what is to come from the Muslim Brotherhood’s co-sponsored “kill the Jews” pep rally held last Friday in Cairo. According to a report in YNet News, about 5,000 people joined the rally at Cairo’s most prominent mosque, the Al-Azhar mosque. Over and over again, the crowd chanted passages from the Koran vowing that “one day we shall kill all the Jews.”
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