Jason Ditz, December 18, 2011
The second of three rounds of voting in the Egyptian parliamentary election has come and gone, and though official results have not been released yet the indications are that the results were even more decisively in favor of the Islamist factions than before.
Once again the Muslim Brotherhood has scored the largest number of votes, with an estimated 39 percent, while the al-Nour Party, another Islamist bloc, got another 31 percent. The two blocs scored 36.6 percent and 24.4 percent, respectively, in the first round.
The Al-Wafd bloc, the top liberal faction, is said to have scored around 20 percent, a decidedly major gain over the 7.1 percent they got in round one. Still, with only one round left they seem destined to be in the opposition, or a minor ally to an Islamist dominated government.
This is doubly so under Egypt’s proportional representation system, where the Muslim Brotherhood was expected to gain about 49 percent of seats with its 36.6% of the vote, and seems to be gaining steam with its calls to sideline the army in favor of civilian representation.
Of course, the military junta has already disavowed the incoming parliament as “not representative,” even though parliament was actually elected with a major turnout, and has promised to see to it they have no real power.
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