BEIRUT — The Egyptian presidential election last Wednesday is a major challenge to all those in this region and abroad who seek to promote more democratic political systems in the Arab World. The dilemma is a simple one: Do we embrace the elections as a step forward towards democracy because a few opposition candidates were allowed to run, or do we dismiss the whole thing as yet one more sham in which the form of democratic contestation is not matched by the substance?
Those who are pleased with the election argue that it represents step-by-step movement towards greater democracy and pluralism, and such gradual, incremental steps are the most logical way to proceed in the Arab World. There is some sense to this argument, but its main drawback is that we’ve been hearing the same argument for several decades now in various Arab countries, and we seem to be collectively stuck at the stage of the initial transformation from autocratic to democratic governance. Countries that have held elections in recent decades include Yemen, Kuwait, Jordan, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and several others, but nowhere has a substantive advance towards democratic governance been achieved. One gets the impression that this is a process that revolves around an endless journey, rather than the destination.
The Egyptian election was fascinating from several perspectives. The thousands of judges who are supposed to oversee the voting process and verify the results asserted their independence from the government and the ruling party, and thus perhaps set the stage for a truly independent judicial oversight process in future votes. Civil society organizations formed a coalition for election monitoring and trained several thousand monitors, whom the state did not allow to enter polling sites. Nevertheless, they did a good job of monitoring as much as they could and came up with the usual litany of election abuses: dead people and children voting, no voter registration lists in some voting sites, pressure by the government to vote for Mubarak’s party, and many others that are as amusing as they are debilitating to an honest election. Much international attention focused on Egypt for the election, even though Mubarak’s victory was a foregone conclusion. And the Egyptian citizenry found itself in the novel situation of hearing the views of competing candidates, even though the entire system was badly tilted in Mubarak’s favor.
My own sense is that this flawed election would be useful as a step towards change only if it represented the beginning of a sustained process of transformation in other aspects of Egyptian political life, such as the media, parliament, civil society and civilian control of the military-security establishment. There is no real sign of any of that to date other than a somewhat more lively press. The burden of proof is on the Mubarak government to show that it really is prepared to make changes and move towards a mode democratic political system, and I see no signs of that happening.
Rather, the Egyptian election seems only to accentuate a wider problem that afflicts presidencies throughout the Arab world these days. In most Arab countries that are not monarchies, presidents often serve for 25 years or more at a stretch, usually anchoring their perpetual incumbency in the rule of the armed forces and security systems. Two other troubling dimensions of Arab presidencies have appeared in recent years. One is the tendency of fathers to pass on rule to their sons, and the other is the tendency of the international community to isolate, pressure or ostracize Arab presidents because their policies are deemed beyond the realm of the reasonable global consensus.
The Lebanese and Syrian presidents are a case in point, as they are increasingly subjected to international pressure that in some cases includes calls for their resignations or dismissals. Syrian President Bashar Assad has already cancelled his visit to the UN General Assembly this month, presumably because he expected to face more criticism and isolation than warm embraces. The Lebanese president, Emile Lahoud, is increasingly discredited and pressured because four of his top security chiefs have been detained and are being charged with involvement in the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, and his days seem numbered. Many of his critics here and abroad see him as a symbol of all that is wrong with Arab presidencies, given that his mandate was extended for three years by a decision of the Syrian government that dominated Lebanon when the decision was made a year ago.
The Tunisian President, Zein Alabidine Ben Ali, and the Libyan leader, Muammar Gadhafi, are paradigms of military strongmen who have brought order to their lands at a very high cost in terms of human dignity and the rights of citizens. They go on ruling for decade after decade, oblivious to any sense of decency in respecting the collective rights of their citizens to decide their own leaderships. And this pattern repeats itself in other lands, like Algeria or Sudan, where military strongmen or members of a single national party rule according to their whims.
The Egyptian election was cleverly marketed as a step towards democratic pluralism, and many people bought that dubious line. The more likely scenario is that Husni Mubarak’s son Gamal will now use the period of the coming 6-year presidential term of his father to prepare to take over. What could have been a significant democratic moment turned out to be a jamboree of Mubarak family political genes.
The problem of presidencies throughout the Arab world is greater than the mere clinging to power by individual rulers or families. It reflects the inability of entire political systems to change this pattern peacefully. If Egypt represents a change in this legacy, we will have to see evidence of that in the months ahead. The election itself was not the significant event in this respect.
Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.
Copyright ©2005 Rami G. Khouri
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Released: 10 September 2005
Word Count: 972
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