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Mubarak Outdoes Himself

(Washington Post) Jackson Diehl - Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a former general, practices politics with martial crudeness. Under pressure from Washington to hold free and fair elections for his formerly rubber-stamp parliament, Mubarak set out this fall to crush his secular and liberal opposition, while allowing the banned Muslim Brotherhood to campaign relatively freely. The goal was to eliminate all moderate opposition and present the U.S. with a choice between his continuing rule - and the eventual succession of his son Gamal - and an Islamic fundamentalist movement. In the Cairo district of Ayman Nour, the liberal democratic runner-up to Mubarak in September's unfree presidential election, the president's party nominated a former state security police officer against Nour; the Muslim Brotherhood's candidate cooperatively withdrew and endorsed Mubarak's man. Some 2,000 government supporters were then illegally registered in the district and, in defiance of a court order, bused in to vote against the local favorite. Nour was declared the loser, and last week the government resumed his criminal prosecution on trumped-up forgery charges. Yet Mubarak's plan worked too well. Egypt's democratic opposition was all but eliminated from parliament - but the Muslim Brotherhood trounced the government at the polls. Because the Islamists limited themselves to contesting fewer than one-third of the districts, Mubarak still holds a majority of the decided seats.
2005-12-05 00:00:00
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