The WSJ reports,"Egyptians finished the first day of voting in a presidential election with a predictable outcome—the installation of a former army chief expected to restore military-backed autocracy in a country desperate for stability after years of political upheaval.
The election of Abdel Fattah Al Sisi is a foregone conclusion in the two-day vote ending Tuesday. He faces only one weak challenger, Hamdeen Sabahi, a leftist who came in third in the last presidential elections in 2012.
As chief of the armed forces, Mr. Sisi led a popularly backed coup last year against the country's first freely elected president, Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. He was ousted after a year in power amid a groundswell of opposition over accusations that he and the Brotherhood were monopolizing power.
Some explained their votes for Mr. Sisi, and his strong backing in general, as an exhausted quest for relief following three years of economic degradation and unprecedented violence".
But for Mr. Sisi's detractors, including Mr. Morsi's Islamist supporters, the vote amounts to little more than a fig leaf to cover Egypt's return to its decades-old tradition of authoritarian rule. Mr. Sisi was military intelligence chief under Hosni Mubarak, who was toppled in the 2011 popular uprising that launched three years of political and social chaos.
The military has taken an outsized role since the uprising against Mubarak, a former Air Force chief. The military eventually sided with the masses protesting Mubarak's rule, bolstering its already positive image among Egyptians whose anger then was confined to a repressive, brutal police force.
After Mubarak stepped down, a council of generals ran the nation for 17 months, often clashing with protesters who were dissatisfied with the pace of transition to civilian rule and the military's zealous shielding of its budget and vast econmic interests from democratic oversight.
Two power centers emerged in Egypt—the military and the Islamists. Though Mr. Morsi rarely challenged the military when he was president, public dissatisfaction over his administration allowed Mr. Sisi, then defense minister and military chief, to reinsert the military back into politics on the premise that the country was at risk of civil war.
The latest round of polling bore stark contrasts to the 2012 vote, when more than half a dozen candidates from a wide spectrum of political identities fought a hard-won battle that fractured the electorate in the first free and fair election in Egyptian history.
Two years of political uncertainty and violence winnowed the list of political options down to two candidates with nearly identical political perspectives. And unlike the contest two years ago, there are strong indications that the voting public is almost entirely united behind Mr. Sisi.Results from early voting by Egyptians living outside the country gave Mr. Sisi nearly 95%.
The numbers reflect an outpouring of national adoration that followed his ouster of Mr. Morsi. Security forces then arrested tens of thousands of protesters who supported Mr. Morsi, including the leadership of his Muslim Brotherhood group. More than a thousand Brotherhood supporters were killed by security forces during months of street fights as the military tried to suppress protests over Mr. Morsi's ouster.
An open-source Egyptian research group known as WikiThawra said in a report released Sunday that more than 41,000 Egyptians had been arrested by security forces for politically related crimes between July 3, 2013—the day of Mr. Morsi's ouster—to May 15, 2014. The dragnet also included secular leaders who publicly questioned the strong-arm policies of the military-backed government that succeeded Mr. Morsi.
The crackdown, alongside the Egyptian media's backing for Mr. Sisi and the anti-Islamist policies, has created a stifling political atmosphere that leaves little room for meaningful opposition, according to election observers including the U.S.-based Carter Center, which cited the poor conditions in its decision not to send a full monitoring team. Mr. Sisi's supporters counter that if the elections seem to overwhelmingly favor their candidate, that is because the majority of Egyptians legitimately support him for president.
