Between December 10th and 12th, over the course of three days, there will be voting in Egypt to elect the country’s president. The result will be announced after a few days, on December 18, but no one expects any big surprises: the outgoing president Abdel Fattah al Sisi, who took power in 2013 with a military coup and has governed with authoritarian methods since then, will win a third mandate after an electoral campaign determined by irregularities and intimidation towards opponents.
The elections should have been held in April 2024, but a few months ago Sisi decided to bring them forward to December: no official explanation was given for this decision, but a rather common interpretation is that Sisi wants to try to obtain a new political legitimacy before implementing the harsh austerity and currency devaluation measures that are necessary to deal with the very serious economic crisis that the country is going through.
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It is impossible to understand what kind of popular legitimacy Sisi really enjoys: in Egypt there are no reliable polls on the approval of leaders. A rather notable indicator, however, is the constant decline in election turnout: in 2014, in the first presidential elections after the coup, 47 percent of Egyptians voted and Sisi obtained 97 percent of the preferences. In 2018 he voted 41 percent and Sisi always obtained 97 percent. But since then, and as the economic crisis worsened, voter turnout has continued to decline: in the last elections held, those of 2020 for parliament, just 28 percent of the over 63 million voted. of eligible voters (parties favorable to Sisi still won).
This decline in turnout is particularly notable for a country like Egypt, where in theory all citizens would be legally obliged to vote, and if they do not they risk a rather high fine: this is why many see the refusal to vote as an attempt to he protests silently.
Abdel Fattah al Sisi is 69 years old and a former army officer who became defense minister and commander of the armed forces in 2011, and who in 2013 led a coup against Mohammed Morsi, the first and only democratically elected president in history of Egypt. After taking power, Sisi transformed Egypt into a military dictatorship that is considered harsher and more oppressive than that of the historic Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, who ruled the country between 1981 and 2011. Today in Egypt the free press does not exist and both political and civil opposition is repressed with extreme harshness.
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His ten years of government were characterized by a continuously worsening economic situation: from 2015 to today the number of people in poverty has gone from 28 to 33 percent. The situation of the Egyptian economy has worsened further recently: inflation is at an all-time high, while the Egyptian pound has lost half its value in the last year and has been the worst performing currency so far this year. world level. Most analysts believe that in order to try to revive the economy, the Egyptian government will be forced to ask for expensive loans from the International Monetary Fund and to devalue the pound, with major consequences for the population.
Meanwhile, in recent years the government has launched grandiloquent infrastructure projects, such as the construction of an extremely sumptuous new administrative capital.
Al Sisi would not have been able to run in this year’s elections because he had already reached the two-term limit set by the Constitution, but in 2019 he pushed through a constitutional referendum that will allow him to remain in power until 2030.
In this year’s presidential elections none of the other candidates is a real threat to the regime, on the contrary: it is believed that some of them have presented themselves in the elections above all to give the false impression that the vote is free and plural, and that al Sisi has opponents.
There are four candidates: al Sisi, who presented himself as an independent despite having the implicit support of numerous parties; the liberal Abdel Sanad Yamama of the Wafd party, which is a historic Egyptian political formation now devoid of popular support; Hazem Omar of the Republican People’s Party, who is believed to be an ally of Sisi; and Farid Zahran of the Social Democratic Party, who is also believed to be quite close to Sisi.
The only candidate who could have threatened al Sisi’s power, the former journalist and parliamentarian Ahmed Tantawi, will not be able to participate in the elections.
