Polls closed with little excitement on Tuesday in Egyptian local elections boycotted by the main opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, and overshadowed by wage protests in which one teenager has died.
With the victory of the ruling party never in doubt after the disqualification of many opposition candidates, few Egyptians turned out to vote.
“The results were known before the voting, the ruling party has already won two thirds of the vote because they were uncontested,” the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights said.
The vote was a shoo-in for the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, which fielded a candidate for every one of the 52,000 council seats up for grabs and launched a major crackdown against the opposition.
But the regime is under mounting pressure after two days of unrest in the Nile Delta industrial city of Mahalla el-Kobra.
A 15-year-old died after being shot by police during clashes on Monday in the city, home to Egypt’s largest textile mill and some of its more militant workers, a security official and medics said.
A doctor said that 96 people had been injured in two nights of protests.
About 300 people were arrested and face charges of rioting.
A high-level government team led by Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif visited Mahalla el-Kobra on Tuesday for talks with the textile workers.
Nationwide, only 30 percent of seats were contested, the official MENA news agency said, paving the way for the ruling party to win 70 percent unopposed.
Tarek Zaghloul of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights said that his group had decided not to formally monitor the elections.
“We took the decision because of the fact that opposition candidates have had such trouble registering and [the seats] are going straight to the ruling party,” he said.
Zaghloul said his group had received reports that members of the opposition liberal Al-Wafd party had been banned from entering polling stations to vote, as well as reports of weak turnout.
Another organization, the Egyptian Association for Supporting Democracy, said its observers were barred from entering polling stations in at least six provinces and some were detained.
“I’ve come to vote in the hope of having a life that is less hard, with no bread problems,” Mohammed Abdel Meguid, 28, said at a Cairo polling station.
“We hope that these elections will change things a bit, if they’re not rigged like the others when the NDP has always won,” he said.
The elections gained an unprecedented importance after a 2005 constitutional amendment requiring independent presidential candidates to secure the backing of councilors.
Those not belonging to political parties, including the banned Muslim Brotherhood whose members sit in parliament as independents, need the support of at least 10 local councilors in at least 14 provinces to stand.
The next presidential election is set for 2011, with many expecting the veteran 79-year-old Mubarak to stand down in favor of his son and senior NDP member Gamal Mubarak.
The Islamist party had been allowed to field just 21 candidates among some 4,000 they originally put forward after a sweeping government crackdown left many would-be candidates behind bars or barred from registering.
In response, the Brotherhood announced a boycott and urged all Egyptians to follow suit.
“We have decided to boycott the municipal elections, to withdraw our candidates and to appeal to the people not to vote,” the deputy head of the Brotherhood’s bloc in parliament, Hussein Ibrahim, said on Monday.
He said the authorities had used “illegal and immoral means” to exclude Brotherhood candidates, including “the arrest of 1,000 members, administrative obstacles to candidates registering and using prisoners as hostages.”
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