Egypt is a sham democracy

Earlier in January, Egypt’s authorities announced the dates for the nation’s next presidential poll. Yet before the starting pistol has been fired, the winner seems not in doubt. Current president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi will almost certainly be his nation’s next president.

A growing list of potential candidates has either withdrawn their bids or seen them blocked. The man with the best chance of tapping the discontent in the Arab world’s most populous nation had been Ahmed Shafik, a former air force general who narrowly lost the country’s only free presidential election in 2012. His lawyer claims that the government forced him to pull out.

This is a profoundly depressing but wholly expected turn of events in Egypt. Now the main threat from within the establishment is a former military chief of staff, though doubts linger over whether he will end up on the ballot.

The army is reported to be secretly buying up private media groups to back a Sisi presidential run. All the signs point to the election being little more than a rerun of the 2014 poll, when Sisi won 96% of the vote. Ludicrously, his opponent in that two-person contest finished third — behind the spoiled ballots. Sisi, a former head of the army, is coy about running again but everyone expects he will.

Egypt is at present a sham democracy. Real power resides with the army, which has lurked in the shadows but overseen an often brutal crackdown on opponents since 2013, when the military came to power by toppling Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi and killing more than 800 protesters in Cairo’s Rabaa Square.

Sisi’s hardline policies have been the midwife to the birth of violent militant organisations.

The Egyptian revolution of 2011 was the high point of the Arab spring. It offered the opportunity for the Egyptian state to include the citizenry in the decision-making process by liberalising politics. Sisi has instead pushed through painful austerity measures while putting society in a stranglehold. London, January 15