Egypt: Shura Council Elections Begin Amid “Non-Positive Atmosphere”

Seen by some observers as a bellwether for the prospects of free and fair elections moving forward — particularly the upcoming parliamentary and presidential contests — Egypt’s Shura Council elections kicked off today, with 446 candidates vying for 74 Council seats.

However, early reports are less than positive. The Egyptian Association for Supporting Democratic Development (EASD), a non-profit committed to supporting and developing the process of democratic reform in Egypt, issued a press release [PDF] indicating that its 1,540 election observers were denied accreditation by Egypt’s High Commission for Elections, thereby limiting their access polling places throughout the country. EASD monitors who weren’t expelled by election officials documented cases of ballot-stuffing for candidates from President Hosni Mubarak‘s National Democratic Party. There are also new allegations that security forces set up checkpoints to filter out those voters who weren’t NDP members. Entissar Nessim, head of Egypt’s Supreme Elections Committee, dismissed the allegations of fraud as “trivial incidents” and insisted that the overall electoral process was “normal.”

After condemning the government for corruption and irregularities leading up to the elections, the Muslim Brotherhood withdrew two of its fourteen Council candidates in protest of what it views as electoral manipulation by Mubarak’s regime. The Ghad Party did the same, and a collection of nine human rights organizations accused the Egyptian government of illegally constraining their ability to monitor the polls.

Elsewhere, Sarah Topol puts this current round of elections in the context of the ongoing political infighting over presidential succession, writing in The New Republic that the “[Shura] elections—and those that follow—will determine which of Egypt’s important power brokers have the upper hand in that struggle.” She runs through a series of prominent stakeholders — Hosni and Gamal Mubarak, the military, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other domestic oppositionists — to conclude that Egypt may be on a trajectory of inevitable constitutional change. And if that’s the case, Topol says, Washington’s prioritization of political stability over advancing democracy in the Arab world “may no longer be sustainable.”