The NDP government refused to accept international election observers under the guise of intervention and meddling in domestic affairs. Instead it has described the skewed High Elections Commission as a trustworthy institution that can protect the sanctity of the electoral process. Yet, thanks to new media technology and plenty of concerned citizens who dutifully documented and disseminated evidence of ballot stuffing and other violations, we now know the election was anything but free and transparent.
The elections did highlight the lengths to which the regime is able to deploy the nationalist card. Government statements like “We do not accept criticism from the US” and “this is a violation of Egypt’s sovereignty” are meant to conjure up anti-colonial sentiments that run deep among many Egyptians. More important than their effectiveness is their political inconsistency. From what we learned through the WikiLeaks, this is an Egyptian government that consults with and relies heavily on foreign support, advice, and endorsement. So what is this charade about the country’s autonomy and sovereignty at threat? A rude and humbling awakening happened shortly after the elections when the very same authorities that rebuffed the international community welcomed in experts from the very same nation they had turned a cold shoulder to. A sharp-toothed aquatic creature that claimed the life of a 70-year-old German tourist had the government fly in shark behaviorists from Florida to assess the situation and determine a course of action.
Presumably, the reason for our acceptance of foreign meddling in our marine issues is warranted by our unfamiliarity with this variety of underwater predators. The same is evidently not true of elections, which we have mastered through extensive experience. This highlights two endemic problems in Egypt’s contemporary culture of power and influence. The first is the failure to acknowledge or reprimand mediocrity and the second is a state of hypnosis that allows the public to overlook, ignore or tolerate this phenomenon.
Let us start with the first problem. In the same week that the world watched Egypt reel from its faux elections, they also watched another Arab country with one eightieth of Egypt’s population and 7500 years its junior triumph over the United States and other world nations to host the most popular sporting event on earth, the football World Cup, in 2022. Qatar, a nation that has been a thorn in the ruling National Democratic Party’s (NDP) back since the emergence of Al-Jazeera, may have pulled some strings, undergone a facelift, obfuscated some blemishes, and put on its most extravagant façade to convince delegates to look past the obvious choice of the United States and sidestep the charm of its sponsor and former President Bill Clinton. The committee’s decision to grant the miniscule peninsular state the right to host the event makes it the first Arab, Muslim and Middle Eastern country to do so.
However to most Egyptians over the age of six, watching this news came with a little lamentation as they remembered 15 May, 2004, the day their country awaited a similar decision as one of several bidding nations for the first World Cup to be held in Africa. In a contest primarily against South Africa and Morocco, and with US$7 million spent on the campaign to put forth the best portfolio and pamper the committee, the self-proclaimed leader of Africa could not garner a single vote out of 24. It was a bitter humiliation which led to the launch of an inconclusive investigation where no one was reprimanded. Mediocrity had escaped unscathed. In fact, it had triumphed.
Six years later, the architect of the bid, then Minister of Youth Ali Eddin Hilal, now holds the prestigious position of media chief of the NDP, whose job it has been to sell these parliamentary elections. It is no wonder that neither Egyptians nor the world bought them. In a cloud of shame, he was replaced by Anas El-Fiki as the Youth Czar whose equally uneventful tenure earned him a promotion to Minister of Information.
The second problem is the state of hypnosis that engulfs Egyptian public culture in the face of this mediocrity. Perhaps it is a function of the incapacitation of judicial institutions in the face of this pandemic. Perhaps it is the fear of standing upright and demanding accountability. But more likely, it is what Italian Marxist writer and philosopher Antonio Gramsci called hegemony.
Once a leader of the Italian Communist Party in the 1920s, Gramsci’s fervent attack on Italian fascism led to his arrest and imprisonment throughout Mussolini’s reign until his death 11 years later. In his seminal collection of writings, Prison Notebooks, Gramsci describes the structure of capitalist society and its consumerist drive as well as a system of myth-making that allows the elite, government and the powerful to shroud societal inequity behind various illusions of their making.
In the United States, one such myth is that of the “American Dream” which allows the populace to believe all are created equal, are afforded equitable opportunities and that anyone is capable of rising up the socioeconomic ladder. Anecdotes, statistics and exemplars are there to affirm this myth. From Michael Jordan to President Obama, stories of rags-to-riches are served up to keep the public hypnotized to the deeply entrenched incongruence that keep more African American men in jail than outside it, that leave 45 million Americans without health insurance and that force the few remaining descendants of the continent’s natives on casino reservations.
Hegemony is the very process designed to shield inequities. It makes obstacles to change seem insurmountable thereby making consent the only viable option. And if dissent emerges, hegemony is there to justify the use of brute force to bring back “tranquility” to the system. The last two weeks have been at once a sweeping success for the political elite and a damning blow to their hegemonic structure in Egypt. With every WikiLeak, the shroud of invisibility wears away, revealing one calamity after the next, refuting one myth after another. Some might be just waking up from the hypnosis, some might feel too disenchanted to demand change and some will pay a hefty price for dissenting. But in the end, all this dissipates when our primordial fear of a pearly-jawed fish resurfaces and the shrieks strike a cacophonously mind-numbing crescendo.
Adel Iskandar is a media scholar and lecturer at Georgetown University. His column appears every other Thursday.
