This past Sunday, Egypt completed the run-off to the second of three rounds of parliamentary elections. The system is set up such that roughly a third of the 444 seats are up for contest in each round. Because the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) is legally banned, they run candidates as independents and so ascertaining their strength, as well as that of President Hosni Mubarak’s ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), lies partially in how many independents end up aligning with them. The results now available are that the NDP won 75 seats bringing its total to 195, while the MB won 29 more seats, giving them 76 claimed seats. The democratic opposition parties won eight seats in the first round, divided between six different parties, but this time they were routed even more completely; the liberal Wafd Party got two seats, and that is it. Bear in mind that the MB is contesting only about a third of the seats, so if their claims are verified, they are winning about 75% of the time.

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It is now clear, if it was not before, that there are two political forces in Egypt of consequence – a corrupt, authoritarian ruling party, and its Islamist opponents. Initial reports of violence and other dirty tricks against the MB by the government led me to expect that they would not fare well this time, and they did receive fewer seats, but still did well. And in regard to the democratic opposition, I originally noted that they were “all but out” – now they really are. Given the rule that in order to run for president a candidate must be endorsed by 65 members of the parliament, this means that next election there will be no democratic alternative to Mubarak.

I conclude by advocating, as I have done before, that the United States bring to an end its $2 billion a year subsidy of this corrupt and repressive government. For more details regarding the first round of elections, see my Nov. 20 post, Egypt: The Brotherhood Up, the Ruling Party Weakened, and the Democratic Opposition All But Out.

By the Edge of the Sword & the Coin of the Realm
Surprised by the success of the Muslim Brotherhood the first time around, this time the regime was taking no chances. According to Reuters, Islamists build Egyptian parliamentary bloc:

…The authorities have curbed leeway given to the Islamists in the early stages of voting. Police restricted voting and detained 860 of the Brotherhood’s activists on Saturday — the fourth of six days of legislative elections. Riot police cordoned off polling stations in Brotherhood strongholds, either preventing anybody from voting or allowing only a trickle of people to cast ballots.

“The aim was to prevent voters from reaching the ballot boxes and to affect the result,” Brotherhood deputy leader Mohamed Habib told Reuters. “But with perseverance the people and the Brotherhood were able to overcome the barriers.”

…Monitors said NDP supporters and the Brotherhood had brawled in places. Armed thugs attacked Brotherhood supporters with machetes in at least one town, witnesses and the victims said. Police also tried to stop journalists reporting freely. Reporters working for the French agency AFP, Reuters, the British Broadcasting Corporation and the U.S.-based Associated Press all said they had been harassed or had equipment or papers seized…

Reuters also reported on vote-buying:

…Brotherhood campaign worker Mahmoud Mohamed, one of several injured people taken to hospital in Hayatim, said he was standing outside a voting station when three men attacked him. “I raised a chair to defend myself but I was hit on the head and shoulder,” he told Reuters. His head was bandaged. Another Brotherhood activist, Hani Mansour, was lying next to him in hospital with eight stitches in his head.

Witnesses said about 20 men armed with guns, swords and knives came to Hayatim early in the day, fired into the air and attacked local people. Mohamed Abdul Hamid, a monitor from the independent Sawasya group, said he witnessed the attack.

In Alexandria, Mahrous Tantawi, an unemployed man, said the NDP paid him 20 Egyptian pounds to vote for its candidate, Abdel Fattah Marzouk. “I got the money last night and now I’m here so they can take me to the polling station to vote,” he told Reuters in one of Marzouk’s offices. “This is a poor area. There is not much people here would not do for 20 pounds,” added Tantawi, 23….

The same article notes that many judges questioned the results, alleging that vote counts were distorted and that voters were intimidated in areas where the MB was known to be strong. Al-Quds al-Arabi reported on the same issue, reporting Monday that the police – not just regime thugs, but police – prevented voters from voting in ten voting offices. The same article reports that an official in the judges’ guild said that there would be more supervision in the third round to prevent this from happening again. Then on Tuesday Al-Quds reported that Mahmud Khadiri, president of the judges’ guild in Alexandria, has said that the judges are now planning to resort to demonstrations against the government, has they had before. The article also noted that the Kefaya Party, an energetic liberal opposition party which has done quite badly in the elections, is planning joint demonstrations.

Perhaps feeling that the Iron Hand was working, according to Al-Quds the government arrested another 190-200 MB activists on Monday. The same report quotes the deputy head of the MB as saying that he expected the arrests to continue for a couple more days.

Morale of the Story: How Not to Fight Radical Islam
So now, what to make of this? According to the Egyptian government’s official newspaper, Al-Ahram, the results confirmed the fairness and transparency of Egyptian democracy! No kidding – several prominent members of parliament, including the ruling party, were defeated, and the article lists them by name – Yussef Wali, the deputy president of the NDP, Khalid Mahi al-Din, head of the opposition party al-Tajammua, Muhammad Abdullah, president of the University of Alexandria, Sayyid Rashid, president of the Workers’ Union, Abu al-Iz al-Hariri, Badri Farghali, and others. So that shows how fair the process was. The article also mentions prominent members of the ruling party who won. But then that’s it. No mention of the Muslim Brotherhood at all. Of course not; they don’t exist.

Muntasir al-Ziyat, an Egyptian Islamist writing in Al-Hayat (On the Egyptian Elections: The Flood of Change), had a different perspective, of course. He argued that any fair electoral system would bring the Muslim Brotherhood into power, a defensible point, since, as noted above, the MB was only contesting about a third of the seats anyway, meaning that it appears to have won at least 75% of the seats it has contested. He also suggested that the government actually wanted the MB to do reasonably well so as to scare Western nations into the recognition that the only alternative to them was the Islamists.

I would say that Egypt is an object lesson on how not to fight radical Islam:

(1) Suppress all open dissent, both liberal and Islamist. This will ensure that the Islamists are the only real opposition, since the religious networks can’t be crushed, but links to human rights groups can be, and the government has prosecuted opposition activists who have worked with Western human rights and civil society groups.
(2) Instead of combating Islamist ideas, co-opt them, let them take over the school system, support Palestinian terrorists to show your commitment to the cause, and then when the Islamists get out of hand, bring out the machetes and the clubs.

This is not a caricature; this really is, I think, a good description of how the government has dealt with radical Islam. During the 1990s the Egyptian government fought and won a bloody war against Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which sought to overthrow the government by force of arms. Meanwhile, the Brotherhood disclaimed the use of arms to take power in Egypt and took over the institutions of society. Thus became the Islamists are the only alternative to Mubarak.

The Final Analysis
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: now is time for the United States to cut off the $2 billion subsidy it gives to Hosni Mubarak’s violent and corrupt thugocracy. It is long past time. Mubarak will argue that he is the only alternative to the Islamists, and he is right for now, and it is because of his policies that this is the case. American policymakers must come to understand that our attachment to the Egyptian government is driving anti-Americanism in Egypt; the people see America is close to this monstrosity. The legal ban on the MB needs to remain, but the myriad of restrictions placed on pro-democracy activists needs to be lifted so that they can develop themselves. U.S. aid to Egypt was originally intended to stabilize the regime in the wake of the peace agreement with Israel and the assassination of Anwar Sadat. It is now clearly in the Egyptian government’s interest to maintain peace with Israel, and in any case Egypt has been harboring members of the terrorist group Hamas, which just happens to be the Palestinian variety of the Muslim Brotherhood. Other means can be used to dissuade Egypt from hostile action toward Israel. Mubarak’s regime is falling; his credibility is gone, and the “reform” element within the ruling party is little more than a shade of the regime. It must change or die. America’s fortunes should be tied to this government no longer.

Kirk H. Sowell, Arab World Analysis.com