National Democratic Party (Egypt) - Electoral System in Egypt

Electoral System in Egypt

The electoral system in Egypt under which the National Democratic Party operated did not meet internationally recognized standards of electoral democracies. According to the Freedom House, the political system is designed to ensure solid majorities for the ruling NDP at all levels of government. In 2009, Dr. Ali El Deen Hilal Dessouki, Media Secretary of the NDP, described Egypt as a "pharaonic" political system, and democracy as a "long term goal". Dessouki also stated that "the real center of power in Egypt is the military". More generally, many analysts and policy makers have observed that there is no such thing as democracy or democratization in the Arab World today. And in the case of Egypt, although President Hosni Mubarak himself recently boasted that Egypt enjoys "all kinds of democracy," substantive democracy and civil liberties within the country remain elusive. "The truth of the matter is that participation and pluralism are now at lower levels than at any time since Mubarak assumed the presidency in the wake of Anwar Sadat's assassination."

Freedom House ranks Egypt's Political Rights Score 6 and Civil Liberties Score 5, with 1 being the most free and 7 being the least free.

Egypt has operated under a "state of emergency" for all but five months since 1967, allowing the president to outlaw demonstrations, hold detainees indefinitely without trial, and issue law by decree. Generally, emergency law provides the government with the authority to control every level of political activity, including that within the confines of the formally defined political arena. The duration of the law is three years, but it is routinely renewed. The trend began when President Gamel Abdel Nasser succeeded in establishing a state of emergency in 1956, following the invasion of Egypt by Britain, France, and Israel, and continued until 1963 on the basis of the continuing threat of an offensive against Egypt. Nasser declared another state of emergency in June 1967 because of the Six Day War, which lasted through the War of Attrition, the October War, and the later years of Anwar El-Sadat's presidency, which were characterised by significant political, economic, and social upheaval and discontent. In total, the state of emergency declared during the 1967 war lasted for 13 years. After Sadat's assassination on 6 October 1981, his Vice-President and successor, Hosni Mubarak, declared another state of emergency, which he kept in place for the entire duration of his three decades in office.

President Mubarak argued in his Presidential Public Address in 1998 that emergency law is required "in order to confront terrorism protect democracy and stability." In practice, though, the law was used to not only control and contain terrorism, but to limit legitimate oppositional political activities. For example, campaign gatherings require prior permission from the Ministry of Interior under emergency law. Thus, when a candidate plans to hold a public meeting, he must submit an application to the local police station stating details such as date, location, and estimated size of the gathering. The application is then sent to the Ministry of Interior for consideration.

The People's Assembly, which is usually characterised as the lower house of Egypt's quasi-bicameral legislature, is constitutionally empowered to question and even challenge presidential authority. However, that it chooses to not do so cannot be attributed to unanimous approval of presidential policies. In actuality, the People's Assembly is restricted to the role of rubber-stamping presidential authority because it is confined by presidential powers beyond its control. Under Article 152 of the Constitution, the president is able to have his proposals bypass the People's Assembly and endorse them through referendum. Consequently, it is impossible for the Assembly to consider or reject the policy.

The President of Egypt, though, rarely needs to resort to referenda, except in circumstances where it is a formal requirement, such as initiating constitutional changes. Article 152 is seldom used because there is no reason to do so. The majority of legislation passed through the People's Assembly is initiated by the President, and almost all of the President's proposals are passed by the mandated two-thirds' majority with little to no deliberation at all.

Academics and analysts observe that talk of democracy and liberal reforms from Egypt's leaders is spurred by a desire to garner internal and external legitimacy; however, these reforms lack the substance needed to open the way for meaningful democratic change. Dr. Augustus Richard Norton of Boston University wrote in 2005 that:

Certainly, the discovery of a democratic vocabulary does not stem from idealistic conversion, but from pragmatic conclusions about the need to relieve pressure and vent political steam, as well as the shrew recognition that democratization wins favor... The new language of politics in the Middle East talks about participation, cultural authenticity, freedom and even democracy. No doubt, the defining flavor of the 1990s is participation.

Elections and apparent multi-party political systems offer authoritarian governments this opportunity for "democracy by decree." However, regimes that adopt these (electoral) systems "tend to impose a number of constraining conditions in order to ensure that the arena of political contest remains under their stringent control. The laws regulating the licensing of opposition parties, for example, always demand a public commitment to the existing political order and the substantive acts of the regime." These were the conditions under which the National Democratic Party in Egypt were formed in 1978 until its dissolution on April 16, 2011 by court order.