Sisi Won the Election, But Still Might Lose Egypt

Egypt's former armed forces chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has won a resounding victory in this week's presidential polls. So resounding, in fact, that there were more voided ballots than votes for his rival.

It is a result which seemingly gives him a mandate to continue his repressive policies uncontested. However, despite winning an overwhelming majority of the vote, Sisi appears surprisingly weak as he prepares to take control of a country facing enormous problems.

Nearly all of the votes in the presidential contest have now been have now been counted. Sisi destroyed his only rival, leftist politician Hamdeen Sabahi, netting more than 93 percent of the vote versus Sabahi's 2.9 percent, the winning camp said today. Significantly more ballots, nearly four percent, were thrown out for errors or irregularities.

Official results will not be announced until early June, but little difference is expected and Sabahi conceded defeat today. He alleged there were severe inconsistencies in voting, although admitted the outcome would not have been significantly changed had they been corrected.

He did, however say the reported turnout figures implausible, describing them as "an insult to the intelligence of Egyptians," according to the Associated Press.

And it was turnout, not vote share, which was crucial for Sisi. He was always going to win, and win by a landslide, but the former field marshall has split the country. His decision to oust Egypt’s first democratically elected President, Mohamed Morsi, and his Muslim Brotherhood was seen by some Egyptians as a coup and by others as a response to public demand. The country was further divided when the military-backed government he installed launched a brutal, and highly controversial, crackdown on the former president's supporters, leaving hundreds dead and thousands more imprisoned.

The international community condemned the crackdown, so Sisi needed a large turnout as well as a victory to legitimize his actions and give the middle finger to his detractors. He knew this and said he wanted at least 40 million of the 54 million registered voters to head to the polls.

In the end, however, around 46 percent of those eligible turned up, according to interim President Adly Mansour, lower than the 52% that voted in 2012.

This was partly the result of Muslim Brotherhood leaders urging their followers to boycott the vote. Many secular liberals who were involved in the popular uprising that overthrew long-time ruler Hosni Mubarak in 2011 made the same decision, however. Some told VICE News that even though they might once have supported Sabahi from a policy perspective, they now feel that him taking part in the elections legitimized Sisi’s inevitable victory.

However, even that 46 percent was hard fought. Voting was originally scheduled to take place over two days. On the first day, however, many polling stations in the capital of Cairo were empty and turnout was just 15 percent. In response, authorities launched a barrage of measures that looked suspiciously like desperate attempts to boost their candidate of choice.

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Day two was a declared a public holiday to allow people to vote. Public transport was free, shopping malls closed early after playing announcements urging people to the polls, texts were sent to voters across the country, and TV network anchors scolded the populace for not turning out.

This still wasn’t enough. Voting was eventually extended into a third day and non-voters were threatened with a fine of 500 EGP (approximately $70), a large amount in a country where the average weekly wage is $92 and many get by on much, much less.

It was not quite as expected. Sisi had been lionized and worshiped as a man capable of fixing all Egypt’s problems, the subject of almost implausibly overwrought editorials praising his “youthful zeal,” “ Herculean strength,” “nerves of steel,” and skin “as gold as the sun’s rays.”

Sisi is now firmly charge of Egypt. However, the country itself is exhausted from three years of turmoil facing dire economic and social problems, and its somewhat disenchanted populace is obviously not quite as behind him as he would have hoped.A recent surveyby the Pew Research Center found that only 54 percent of Egyptians have a positive opinion of their president-elect.

This will be cause for concern in a country in which mass protests have led to the overthrow of two presidents in just over three years.

Obviously a large segment of society does support him, especially business figures, security forces, and the many who see him as a savior who rescued Egypt from murderous Islamists.

Sherif Ibrahim, a retired IT specialist told VICE News that he voted for Sisi in the hope of improving stability. Ibrahim is no army hardliner, however, and says both Morsi and the Supreme Council of Armed Forces, which took power from Mubarak in 2011, were "a disaster."

Instead, he describes himself as a “Western liberal" who was not happy with a religious element in power during the Morsi-era. “I was so depressed when the Muslim brotherhood and the Salafist politicians were in national assembly,” he said. The main reason for him voting for Sisi, however, was in the hope of reinvigorating the economy. “We just want to get back to work,” he said. “We need to get back to work.”

But Egypt’s economy is a mess; foreign investment, tourism and consumer confidence are desperately low. Unemployment is climbing along with government debt and inflation, while at least 40% of Egyptians live under the poverty line, according to UN data. Perhaps even more worryingly, the government is only making its payment obligations thanks to billions of dollars in aid from Gulf countries.

Essam El Zawawy, a tour guide, also voted for Sisi in the hope that he would get the economy back on track. He told VICE News that the decline in tourists has hit him hard, and he is now desperate for business to return. “It has been three years and four months and now there is still no work like before,” he said. “I hope Sisi makes something good for the country and then people will come to visit so much.”

Sisi’s economic policies are not entirely clear. He has been open about the extent of the problems facing the country in television interviews, but seemed to lay the burden on the country’s poor. He suggested that Egyptians should work hard and conserve money, said that young Egyptians could forgo cars or public transport to reach work or education.

Worse still, he suggested someone eating a load of bread should slice it into quarters so there is more. Even though there isn’t. He went on to propose energy saving light bulbs as a solution to the country's energy crisis. Videos posted on social media thoroughly mocked his proposals.

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Shadi Hamid, former director of research at the Brookings Doha Center, told VICE News that Sisi's economic policies are "very vague and undefined" and that he was yet to explain how he was going to tackle the country's fiscal woes: “He’s vaguely populist, and like most populist Egyptian politicians, he seems center-left in the vague sense that he’ll support the free market when it improves the economy but emphasize the state’s role in the economy when that’s necessary."

Given that one of the rallying calls of the Egyptian revolution was “bread, freedom, and social justice,” economic mismanagement is likely to be a major worry for Sisi. After all, the last three years have shown that political and economic stability are entwined - one is not possible without the other.

The security situation is also likely to be a huge headache. In particular, Sisi's ongoing battle with Islamist groups. He has sworn to “end” the Brotherhood, and his emphasis on doing so has been one of the only identifiable constants in his political vision, Hamid says. However, they are deeply entrenched in Egyptian society, particularly outside of the country's urban centers. Some rural areas are even no-go zones for police, because they are effectively Brotherhood strongholds. Continuing persecution of the group will give it more of an incentive to play spoiler and likely radicalize some of its members.

A fully-fledged insurgency is already underway in the Northern Sinai Peninsula, where militants have killed hundreds of members of the security forces. Terrorist attacks by Muslim extremist groups, including car bombings, have spread as far as the capital Cairo.

The military backed government has used this as a pretext to crackdown on civil liberties. Sisi has maintained the same line, voicing support for a Draconian protest law and warning journalists not to expect, nor push for freedom of the press.

Rather than a recipe for stability, Maha Azzam, an Associate Fellow with Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa Program told VICE News that both this and the campaign to eradicate the Brotherhood are likely to stir up further opposition to Sisi's rule.

“The more persecution and repression there is, the more resistance there will be to this regime. If you couple that with a failing economy and a security challenge that is persistent, then I don’t think either Sisi or any political regime in Egypt can survive.” She adds that as free expression is blocked, more and more are likely to resort to violence to make their voices heard.

Nevertheless, she expects human rights violations to escalate now that Sisi has been endorsed at the ballot box. These, she says, will likely be sold as the product of a need for stability, a war on terror, or an effort to boost the economy. “The election will be seen by him as carte blanche to pursue whatever draconian or repressive measures are seen as necessary in order to sustain himself at the helm of the Egyptian political system or to sustain the system itself,” she said. “It bodes very badly for any kind of democratic opening-up or easing of the repressive nature of the Egyptian state.”

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