Political Parties in Egypt: Alive, but Not Kicking

The results of the 2005 parliamentary elections clearly revealed the weakness of party life in Egypt. The ruling party, the National Democratic Party (NDP), proved to be a hollow structure whose survival is predicated primarily on the state's strong backing and electoral irregu-larities. NDP candidates lost two-thirds of the contested 444 seats, and several of its leading members failed to get re-elected. The results of the elections were similarly discouraging for the legal opposition. The 20 legal opposition parties, which collectively fielded 395 candidates, were able to win only 12 seats (2.5%). A more serious problem was that the elections that followed a period of relative political mobility and mounting expectations for reform and change failed to attract the majority of the Egyptian voters. Only 23% of the registered voters turned out to participate in this presumably momentous national event. The two major winners in the elections were not the legal political parties but the banned Muslim Brothers (MB) and the independent candidates (most of whom later rejoined the NDP, thus giving it the majority it needed in the parliament). The former won 20% of the seats, and the latter captured more than 40%.