Egypt’s military rulers will chose September 27 as the opening day for candidacy in the first free parliamentary election in almost a century, said Egypt's flagship paper Al-Ahram.
It added that parallel with the announcement of the opening date, a new controversial law that regulates the electoral constituencies will be announced as well.
“Such a law will decrease the number of constituencies,” said the paper. Previously, Egypt has had 222 constituencies with two candidates representing each. This means that the total number of seats of the People’s Assembly was 444.
Islamic forces, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis along with the liberal Wafd Party, welcomed the news, while liberals and leftists rejected the law and called for postponing the elections, reported the paper.
Essam al-Erian, the vice chairman of the Freedom and Justice Party and leader in the Muslim Brotherhood, told the paper that the Coalition for Egypt, which consists of over 30 political parties including the Wafd Party and the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, will convene to consider the idea of creating one unified list for the elections.
However, political figure George Ishak said “It’s impossible to conduct the elections in such circumstances since there is no wide consent over the law regulating them. Furthermore, political forces should have their say in discussing the law regulating constituencies.”
Last July, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) unilaterally announced a new electoral law in which 50 percent of seats in the lower house of parliament, the People’s Assembly, will be awarded through closed-list proportional representation, while the other half will be awarded in two-seat districts.
The announcement divided secular political parties, which allege that the new system will enable only big parties such as the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood and the remnants of the ousted regime to control the next parliament, which will be responsible for drafting the nation’s constitution.
Meanwhile, the main dilemmas so far for conducting elections are continuing protests and sit-ins all over the country and deteriorating security.
Columnist Fahmy Howeidy writes in privately owned Al-Shorouk that in the last seven months people have demonstrated and blocked roads in order to raise their demands and sufferings.
For Howeidy, people are not demanding so much. They risk being killed while crossing roads because they don’t have an alternative. Others can’t get bread because of the corruption in distributing flour for bakeries. In the southernmost part of Egypt, people are suffering as groundwater badly affects their homes.
“The new aspect in these cases in that people have broken the silence and raised their voices… And despite the fact that I don’t agree with such protests, which may cause chaos in Egypt, I have to say that this is a message to the decision makers and the elites in Cairo,” he writes.
Nehal Shoukry in Al-Ahram sheds light on the one of the worrying phenomena that has come up since the revolution, which is acts of thuggery in the streets.
She says that the year 2011 is best known for being the year of the Arab revolutions, but in Egypt it is also the year of thugs and the absence of law. Hospitals are being attacked systematically, while security forces are absent from the whole scene, especially on highways.
Shoukry writes that most frightening is that people are thinking seriously of protecting their homes and properties against thuggery, and this means more crimes will be committed and the rule of law will diminish forever.
In August, people in the Delta city of Desook attacked a “local thug”, cutting his head off in the street and parading his dead body through the city. In the working class district of Boulak al-Dakrour, residents cut an alleged thief's hand off and destroyed another’s eye.
Also in Al-Ahram, Hezem Abdelrahman concludes that such crimes mean the downfall of the judicial authority in Egypt since people are being the judges who issue verdicts and perform harsh sentences.
Abdelrahman doesn’t hide his resentment about such acts, giving them no justification: “this is barbaric," he says, while trying to bring up reasons for why they are happening.
The absence of security and mistrust of the judicial system are elements that cause the rise in such phenomena. However, Abdelrahman says that Islamic forces should also be blamed for such acts. These forces resent the modern notion of the civil state and the rule of law, and they want the application of Sharia, by force if necessary.
