The New York Times:
CAIRO - Islamists claimed a decisive victory on Wednesday as
early election results put them on track to win a dominant majority
in Egypt’s first Parliament since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, the
most significant step yet in the religious movement’s rise since
the start of the Arab Spring.
The party formed by the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s mainstream
Islamist group, appeared to have taken about 40 percent of the
vote, as expected. But a big surprise was the strong showing of
ultraconservative Islamists, called Salafis, many of whom see most
popular entertainment as sinful and reject women’s participation in
voting or public life.
Analysts in the state-run news media said early returns
indicated that Salafi groups could take as much as a quarter of the
vote, giving the two groups of Islamists combined control of nearly
65 percent of the parliamentary seats.
That victory came at the expense of the liberal parties and
youth activists who set off the revolution, affirming their fears
that they would be unable to compete with Islamists who emerged
from the Mubarak years organized and with an established following.
Poorly organized and internally divided, the liberal parties could
not compete with Islamists disciplined by decades as the sole
opposition to Mr. Mubarak. “We were washed out,” said Shady
el-Ghazaly Harb, one of the most politically active of the
group.
The Twitter feeds of liberal-minded Egyptians have made for grim
reading in the past few days. “The Big Pharaoh,” an Egyptian who
gained a following in the mid-2000s libertarian-conservative
English-language blogosphere writing under that pseudonym, has been
tweeting things
like
this:
We’re convincing a friend who doesn’t drink alcoholic beverages
to do so. “Try before it’s too late” we said.
I now know why my mom is so paranoid after the revolution. She
had a lot of Jewish friends back in the late 50s.
But the crucially important thing to understand about this
moment is in this
pair of
tweets:
Victory of Islamists is a direct result of Mubarak’s rule and
his habit of crushing any alternative to the Islamists. Will never
forgive him
If you’re even thinking that Mubarak was better, remember that
such results are a direct outcome of his failed rule.
Egypt may be in for some dark days; Mubarak’s ruling strategy
probably made this inevitable. (It’s a fantasy, by the way, to
think that extending Mubarak’s reign was a real option for US
policymakers; the Obama administration might have stuck with him
all the way down, and there might have been benefits to such a
policy in addition to costs, but Mubarak was going down no matter
what.)
There is a silver lining: A Salafi who is pressing his demented
political agenda through a democratic process is one who is, at
least for now, not joining a terrorist group. And if free and fair
elections can be routinized, perhaps there will be a day when
Egyptians elect a parliament that is interested in joining the 21st
century.
Some have argued that the US should use its leverage to push
the military on seeing through the democratic transition, and I
mostly agree with them. But as the process of writing a
constitution goes forward, it is perhaps even more important that
the administration use its influence with the military to
indirectly pressure the parliament to write a constitution granting
the liberties — freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom
of association, freedom of religion, universal suffrage — that
will give non-Islamist parties the ability to compete in the
future.
