The Salafi Question: Egypt’s Constitutional Moment
After the Muslim Brotherhood gained 40 percent of the vote and the Salafis 25 percent in the first round of Egypt’s parliamentary elections, Rana Abdelhai, a student, told New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof that while she would never vote for a Muslim Brotherhood or Salafi candidate, “This is democracy now. We have to respect who other people choose, even if they make the wrong choice.” A few days earlier, Dalia Zaida, a young activist, made a similar comment to an NPR reporter, saying, “I’m worried, but you know, as someone who really believes in democracy, I have to respect people’s choice.” Many others seem to share this view. Kristof considered Abdelhai’s observation “wise.”
Such observations represent a very basic but surprisingly common misunderstanding about democracy, namely that it is the rule of the majority. According to this view, if a majority voted that boys can go to school but girls cannot, one must accept this ruling because it was determined in a legitimate way—and to contest it would be to undermine democracy. One may, of course, seek to convince the majority of voters to support equal rights for women or generally respect individual rights—but for now, whatever the majority enacts is to be considered legitimate.
True, even among those who hold this very truncated view of democracy, there are some who recognize that if a party seeks to use its majority to destroy the democratic process, it may be excluded from participating in the elections and from being represented in the legislature. Thus, some political scientists argue that when the Nazis were on the rise in Germany in the 1920s and clearly sought to establish a tyranny, they should not have been allowed to gain legitimacy by winning elections to the Parliament and, ultimately, having their leader named Chancellor of Germany. Indeed, post-WWII Germany outlawed the Nazi Party. And decades later, German interior ministers are attempting to exclude the far-right National Democratic Party from elections. Other countries, like Belgium and Spain, have similarly sought to ban parties that pose threats to national security, resulting in racist and secessionist parties like Vlaams Blok and Batasuna being forbidden from competing in elections. These nations have banned select political parties, citing “the need of democratic states to be vigilant and aggressive in defending themselves against antidemocratic threats from within—particularly the threat posed in the electoral arena by antidemocratic parties using democratic elections to assume power.”