El-Sissi victory likely as Egyptians start voting
Little-known foe put on ballot to avoid a one-candidate race.
Egyptians began voting Monday in an election that President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi is virtually guaranteed to win, one that resembles the referendums held by Arab autocrats in the decades before the 2011 uprisings briefly raised hopes of dem- ocratic change.
His only challenger is Moussa Mustafa Moussa, a little-known politician who joined the race at the last minute to spare the govern- ment the embarrassment of a one-candidate election after several hopefuls were forced out or arrested.
Moussa, who supported el-Sissi until he joined the race, made no effort to chal- lenge the incumbent, who never mentioned his challenger once in public. “Today we want the people to come out and vote ... It doesn’t matter who wins as long as Egypt remains safe,” Moussa said after casting his ballot Monday.
Authorities hope enough of Egypt’s nearly 60 million eligible voters will take part in the three-day balloting to give the election legiti- macy. Local media, which are dominated by pro-government commentators, have portrayed voting as a national obligation and the only way to prevent foreign conspiracies from sowing instability.
Some of the presidential hopefuls who had stepped forward might have attracted a sizable protest vote, but they were all either arrested or intimidated into with- drawing, making this the least competitive election since the 2011 uprising ousted longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak.
The vote is being held against the backdrop of the most wide-ranging crackdown on dissent in decades, with thousands of Islamists as well as several prom- inent secular activists in jail. Unauthorized protests are banned, critical voices have been silenced in the local media, and hundreds of websites, including those of independent media and rights groups, have been blocked.
El-Sissi, who led the 2013 military overthrow of Egypt’s first freely elected president, the Islamist Moham- med Morsi, cast his ballot as soon as the polls opened at 9 a.m., at a girls’ school in the Cairo suburb of Heliopolis. He made no public com- ments.
Reporters visiting polling stations across Cairo saw short lines formed in front of some locations and others that were nearly empty as of early afternoon, though more voters were expected to come out in the evening and over the next two days.
Local television aired foot- age of festive scenes outside some polling stations, with women and children singing nationalistic songs. The national election commission reported large turn- out in Cairo, Alexandria and northern Sinai, the epicenter of an insurgency led by the Islamic State group, but provided no figures.
“I’m not lazy or apathetic, I’m intentionally skipping this one,” said Ahmed, a young man smoking a water pipe at a café in central Cairo. A shopkeeper in downtown dismissed the election, saying the world was laughing at Egypt. Both asked that their full names not be used, fear- ing reprisal.
Tens of t ho u sands of police and soldiers have been deployed for the vote.
On Sunday, authorities said police killed six mili- tants believed to be involved in a weekend bombing in the coastal city of Alexandria that killed two policemen.
Mohammed Ibrahim Ali, a retired engineer, patiently waited for the polls to open at Cairo’s bustling Sayda Zeinab neighborhood, home to a famous Islamic shrine.