Egypt’s Islamist Tsunami
It turns out my colleague Sam Tadros was right on the mark in his prognostication of the first phase of the Egyptian parliamentary elections. On Tuesday, he predicted:
The question is not whether the Islamists will win, but what the size of their victory is going to be. Contrary to the earlier narrative propagated by the Western media, the Islamist victory will not be in the 30-40 percent range. It is quite apparent to anyone that has been paying attention that their victory will be nothing short of a tsunami.
As the New York Times is reporting this morning, in an article headlined, “Islamists Claim Mandate in Early Voting,” preliminary calculations of the results from the first of three phases of voting for the parliament indicate that assorted Islamists have won a whopping 65 percent of the seats that were voted on this week. The Muslim Brotherhood, which the Times labels the “mainstream” Islamist group, appears to have garnered 40 percent, while the “ultraconservative,” Taliban-like Salafis captured 15 percent.
This is only a preliminary analysis of the first round of voting (Sam will have more to say on this once the votes are officially counted and public), and the final results will not be known until January. However, subsequent voting is expected to show even more dire results for non-Islamists. As Sam has already explained, the non-Islamists will perform better in the first stage than they will in the overall results because this phase includes the big cities of Cairo and Alexandria, which include non-traditional populations that are not representative of more rural areas.
Remember the Gallup poll last June finding that “only 15 percent of Egyptians said that they support the Muslim Brotherhood, while more than 60 percent showed no political preference”? Then, the AP opined: “The results appeared to counter a widely held view that the Muslim Brotherhood will be the main winner in [Egypt’s] parliamentary elections.”
Well, last summer’s polling was wrong, later Western media predictions doubling the Brotherhood support were also wrong, and now, barring a military crackdown, Egypt is on the trajectory for an Isalmist constitution and Islamist rule.
What does this mean for individual rights and freedoms? The New York Times’s David D. Kirkpatrick reports:
The Brotherhood has pledged to respect basic individual freedoms while using the influence of the state to nudge the culture in a more traditional direction. But the Salafis often talk openly of laws mandating a shift to Islamic banking, restricting the sale of alcohol, providing special curriculums for boys and girls in public schools, and censoring the content of the arts and entertainment.
Like the pre-vote predictions of the Western media, it too misses the point.
