“Get up stand up for your rights…
…don’t give up the fight.” That’s what Bob Marley was singing as my cab circled Tahrir square this afternoon to deposit me at the Egyptian Museum.
I’d just come from a conversation with a leader of the revolutionary opposition. He opened by warning me sternly that the West was exaggerating the importance of the Islamists in Egypt. They would gain no more than 3-5 million votes out of 25-30 million, which is the number that can be expected to vote this fall. The revolutionary opposition, trying hard to form a broad coalition to include moderate Islamists, hopes to win a majority, or at least a plurality.
The big challenge is the proposed electoral law, which divides Egypt into large constituencies in a system that is 50/50 open and closed list. This will favor larger, better known and better organized forces, like Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP) and the Muslim Brotherhood.
The revolutionary opposition favors a closed list system (with smaller constituencies or a proportional system–which or both wasn’t clear to me), with people allowed to vote from abroad. This would mean party lists fixed by party leaders with no voting for individuals. If they don’t get it, the opposition may boycott the elections, which my interlocutor thought would deny legitimacy to the results.
But most of all the revolutionary opposition wants the constitution written before elections. The September 9 demonstration is its remaining best opportunity to force this issue. It was a mistake to allow the army the role it has in the transition process, and now the opposition will have to live with its mistake. But it can still try to get the army to listen to the people–the only way to force it to do that is by returning to Tahrir.
Tahrir seemed to me mostly a construction site these days, which I guess is an apt metaphor for the situation the country is in. I prefer that to the metaphoric museum, whose extraordinary collection of treasures is so shabbily housed, labeled and cared for behind its pretty pink facade that it is hard not to wonder what their eventual fate will be.
I also had to wonder about the fate of the Camp David accords, which aren’t nearly as old and dusty as the artefacts from King Tut’s tomb. My interlocutor thought Camp David unfairly limited the development of Sinai, where Hamas is enjoying free rein and blowing up the gas pipeline that takes Egyptian gas to Israel. Islamist domination of the Sinai would be harmful. The opposition wants to know what secret agreements were made at Camp David and to exert full Egyptian sovereignty in Sinai.
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