Members of the Constituent Assembly are split over which parliamentary election system to adopt in the country's new constitution, which is expected to be finished before the end of this year.
The Salafi Nour Party and a number of secular parties agreed, during a session of the assembly's Electoral Systems Committee held at the People’s Assembly on Tuesday, to back the list-based candidacy system for the next legislative elections. But Muslim Brotherhood members leaned toward the single-winner system.
"Egyptians have been used to the individual system, but personally, I [would] go for proportional lists. An individual system may discount 45 percent of the votes if 51 percent [vote] for a certain candidate," Brotherhood spokesperson Mahmoud Ghozlan said during the meeting.
"A mixed election system is the most adequate for Egypt, and the distribution of seats for each system shall be done through agreement between political parties and should enjoy public approval," he added, stressing that the new election law should enable non-partisan candidates to form electoral lists and partisan candidates to compete for individual seats.
But Bassam al-Zarqa, a member of the Nour Party's supreme board and an adviser to President Mohamed Morsy, said he preferred the list-based system. Ghad al-Thawra Party chairman Ayman Nour and Egyptian Social Democratic Party board member Fardi Zahran were among the other members who agreed.
Alaa Qutb, another assembly member, objected to using a mixed electoral system like the one employed in the last parliamentary elections, as well as to maintaining the 50 percent quota of seats that had long been reserved for workers and farmers.
A June Supreme Constitutional Court ruling, upheld by the Supreme Administrative Court last month, dissolved the People’s Assembly over the unconstitutionality of parts of the election law that enabled partisan candidates to vie for seats allocated for independents.
After former President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation, the political parties, along with the then-ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces decided on a complex electoral system in which two-thirds of Parliament seats are filled by candidates elected from party lists, with the remaining seats allocated for independent candidates. The result was an Islamist-dominated Parliament in which the Muslim Brotherhood and the ultra-conservative Nour Party held nearly two-thirds of the seats.
In the previous five parliamentary elections under Mubarak, the electoral system was based on individual candidates only, a strategy that commentators said helped the ruling party dominate Parliament.
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
