In Part 1 we saw some of the salient features of the story that punctuate Election representation and politics in Egypt. This narrative presumes that the ruling regime is conspiring to reduce the Brotherhood’s share in the parliament form 88 seats to maybe 15, and divide the rest between itself and the “official opposition parties,” especially the Wafd (for a plethora of reasons that were detailed in Part 1). Only two days ago, Al-Youm Al-Saibi’ estimated that regime will take away 61 seats from the Brotherhood, 33 of which it will supposedly give to the Wafd and 7 to the Naserites (both the main party and Karama), keeping most of the what remains to itself. Noteworthy here is that it published this estimate in its headline, and again, that everyone already “knew” so. The Wafd thus features preeminently in every version of our conspiracy story, as almost all players except it to inherit the biggest part of the Brotherhood’s share. The developments on the ground corroborate these estimates too, for the regime has been imparting enormous violence against the Brotherhood on daily basis for a good month now, without once harassing the Wafd. Moreover, we saw how to satisfy this conspiracy the regime had to adapt its old election-rigging system to allow for dividing the Brotherhood’s share in the parliament among “official opposition parties” that cannot win so many seats on their own (e.g. the Wafd used to score 6 seats in the old rigging system, now it has to score 30 - 40 seats, some analysts go as far as even 60, which entails a 1000% growth). Or so our organizing narrative goes.
In addition to this, I proposed in Part 1 that our narrative involves what sociologists call méconnaissance (misrecognition), which very roughly describes situations like seeing someone you know and deciding to pretend not to know him or her (which we all do sometimes), but more in relation to sociological and political articulations of this logic. That is precisely the point that I want to pick up here: I wish to explore more concretely the ways in which our narrative organizes elections’ representation and politics on the ground—in its dual capacity to evoke at once our conspiracy and its méconnaissance regarding the Wafd and the Brotherhood. As I had proposed, this combination of conspiracy and méconnaissance forces the great majority of political players and media personnel to embody a deranged proviso that runs roughly as follows:
“We all know well that it is all a conspiracy against the Brotherhood; but we need sincerely to believe that it is about rigging the elections in general by an undemocratic regime; for ultimately the Brotherhood deserves what’s happening to it because it is what it is; and this has nothing to do with the fact that we have almost zero popularity on the ground and would lose badly in free elections; because the masses are actually with us; so down with Mubarak and long live fair elections.”
I stopped in Part 1 at identifying this proviso. In what follows I want, therefore, to illustrate more concretely how it translates into politics and representations on the ground. To start, it was very active in the collapse of the boycott-speak. Recall that most opposition groups initially called for boycotting these elections in light of how voting has became meaningless under the new system. They argued that the regime would be worse off managing the coming phase with a bankrupt parliament with zero-hegemony. As it stands now, they say, the presence of several independent opposition groups, especially the Brotherhood, bestows some hegemony on this already rigged parliament, which the boycott would supposedly take away from it. Or so their story went. This call was so strong that at until three months ago most intellectuals and analysts were readily equating the idea of participating in the elections to “betraying the nation.” Then it died out over night: just like that, as if we never had it. The way it died out exposes the sinister fact that everyone knew that everyone will participate in the end, but pretended not to know so for months (with some exceptions, of course). Amnesia was already programmed into the story from day one: “we all know that we will forget about it in a while even as we were calling for it.” In hindsight, disavowing the boycott was built into its very call.
Elbaradei’s camp provides us with a good illustration of this amnesia. A few weeks ago, a number of western donors budgeted close to a $1 million for monitoring the elections. Several NGO coalitions (mostly from the Human Rights field) who applied for this money were, and still are, fervent supporters of Elbaradi and his National Assembly for Change (NAC). Their action triggered a heated debate about their integrity and relation to colonial funding. Then it was revealed that many of the activists “volunteered” to monitor the election with these NGOs based their choice of coalition on how much they pay (between 75 to 150 pounds a day, depending on the coalition and its donors). And as you would expect this only exacerbated the problem and intensified the debate.
While I agree that political integrity and coloniality are pressing matters in this affair, I am bringing it up here with a very different point in mind. In being Elbaradei and NAC zealots these “civil society” people were, by extension, among the toughest supporters of the boycott (the NAC was the first coalition to equate between participation and treason). As a result, they went about for quite some time smearing those who plan to participate in these elections. Unlike what you would expect they didn’t focus their smearing on the Wafd; they targeted the Brotherhood instead (they’re all secular fundamentalists), an interesting point by itself. What’s more important, still, is the fact that they didn’t feel any need to explain why they shifted to favour participation. Put differently, they didn’t feel any need to explain why they left the boycott behind. Instead they started to defend the efficacy of aid in monitoring the elections in a way that elevated participating in them. More importantly, no one really needed an explanation for this radical 180-degree shift, because ultimately everyone knew that this would happen in the end. And thus they all engaged in heated theoretical discussions about the efficacy of colonial aid that hid everything else.
The same point comes out on a more macro level in the way the stock market has been reacting to the elections thus far. The Egyptian press has been at pains trying to explain why the stock market has not reacted to the elections at all, as it does all over the world. The conclusion that they came up with was that there isn’t much economic difference between the various candidates, and hence it doesn’t affect the financial market. But surely if the Brotherhood were to win the market would be affected, not to say it would just crash. The more likely reason why the stock market couldn’t care less about the elections is that they felt they knew its results beforehand, but the press needs to talk about it too in méconnaissance terms.
Polishing the liberal hero
The best illustrations of our election proviso at work come from the Wafd itself, still. The media has been trying to convince us why the Wafd’s popularity has surged so much that it might increase its 6 seats to maybe 30 or 40 for four months already, most of the time with a lot of passion. The affect in this affair centers on polishing the party’s new leader, Al-Saiyed Al-Badawi, as an efficient new leader who is about to turn his party around. However, Al-Badawi had taken office only a month before the media started to promote this image of him, hardly a sufficient time to turn around a grocery shop, let alone a political party with limited outreach. Al-Badawi`s vast wealth is almost always evoked as one of the main reasons why he will be able to accomplish this, for want of a better word, miracle, since endogenous factors cannot explain it. Soon after the Wafd had declared its participation, Ramy Lakah, a prominent Wafdist and billionaire, spelled this one out for us by stating: “the party has the wealth and human resources needed to achieve unprecedented victory in the coming elections.” (It is indeed the only party other than the ruling party that has such wealthy membership). As we have seen in Part 1, the results of the upcoming elections will have nothing to do with one’s resources or wealth—not that the Wafd has that much human resources to begin with. It is therefore strange that he’d be so sure of “an unprecedented victory” based on them. Besides, nothing on the ground says that there is any chance for them to make “an unprecedented victory” based on these two factors. Anyhow, we were repeatedly asked to expect this miracle because of at least the man’s money.
On top of that, the regime has been also actively polishing him by granting him strategic favors that it regularly denies to other politicians, including permission to organize a convoy to Gaza. His convoy came immediately after the Brotherhood’s (which I discussed in Part 1), and was clearly trying to compete with it. Unlike the Brotherhood’s, however, the regime neither harassed them seven times on the way nor confiscated their cargo in the end; to the contrary, they facilitated every step of his trip. His convoy also came two weeks after he became the president of the Wafd, and hence was his first media stunt as president. The extent of this gift stands out quite starkly when we compare it not only to the Brotherhood’s convoy (in Part 1), but also to the treatment that Magdy Hussien got for his Gaza sympathies. Hussien is a president of political party too: Al-‘Amal Islamic Party. In 2009, he wanted to show solidarity with the Gazans, like Al-Badawi, but the Egyptian authorities denied him entry to enter Gaza. After giving up on getting the permission he just entered Gaza through the tunnels, where he stayed for some days. He was arrested upon return for crossing the borders illegally, and was then sent to a military court that sentenced him to two years in prison from the very first hearing. Now, Al-Badawi can falsely claim to be a hero of the Palestinian cause, while Hussien lies in prison for being a real one. The regime is the one that determines this differential treatment, which cannot be for nothing.
On top of that, Al-Badawi’s owns an influential satellite TV channel, a privilege that only a few businessmen enjoy in Egypt. The State Security Intelligence (SSI) doesn’t allow anyone that it doesn’t fully trust to operate a small radio program, let alone own a TV channel. That also means that the regime was already treating Al-Badawi as one of its good boys long before he became the Wafd’s president. And as if this wasn’t enough, he also bought Al-Dostor a couple of months after he had become president. This was the paper that opposed Gamal Mubarak’s inheritance project most at that time. In fact, Ibrahim Eissa, its chief editor, made a career mission out of opposing Mubarak and his son, which always reflected in his paper. So, while mainstream stories were trying to convince us that Al-Badawi’s huge media machine was about to boost Al-Wafd’s popularity like never before (to prepare us for the coming election results), the opposition was anxious that his SSI connections would eventually tone down the Dostor’s firm opposition to the inheritance project, in exchange for more seats in the parliament, of course. This was the independent opposition’s interpretation of Al-Dostour’s sale from the day one, and time proved them right, as we shall see in a minute.
For some reason the sale of Al-Dostour also prompted Al-Masry Al-Youm (Egypt’s biggest “independent” paper) to claim in a front-page article that the deal included 1 million pounds for Issa. Issa denied the news and decided to sue Al-Masry Al-Youm for fabricating it. Naturally, activists didn’t accept that this was just an innocent mistake on Al-Masry Al-Youm’s part, given that it’s the mouthpiece of the security establishment in Egypt. So why is a paper like that so anxious to tell us that Issa is making a million pounds out of upholding the cause of the poor and democracy that they couldn’t even wait to validate it? The answer came a few days later when the new owner of Al-Dostour sacked Issa for his “financial greed.” In hindsight the fact that Al-Masry Al-Youm tried to prepare the readers for this move from day one showed the extent to which all these networks intersect.
In any case, the sale caused a lot of anxiety among the opposition, but before having the chance to reflect on it the news came out that the state pressured the owner of ON TV to remove Issa from Baldana Bil-Masry—his popular and pungent talk show on ONTV. The timing of this news seemed absurdly dubious. Had they sacked him from ONTV before, and not after selling Al-Dostor, perhaps Al-Badawi wouldn’t have been able to buy it. Did they wait for him to buy it? Did they time it such that buying it would look better than what it is really about? Why is the SSI organizing this affair so tightly? We didn’t need to speculate for long because a week later Al-Badawi just sacked Issa from Al-Dostor, as said before. Now Egypt’s most pungent, anti-Gamal Mubarak journalist has been removed from the media at large, and everyone expects the Wafd to get something in return: of course, more seats.
Eventually Al-Badawi’s purchase of Al-Dostor started to fit in a scheme to reduce the opposition’s media heat during the coming phase, a phase that the Wafd also stands to gain from. After all, no one ever doubted that Al-Badawi would be more inclined to “listen” to the regime’s demands to lower the paper’s tone than its pervious owner would have been. He is a business tycoon like the owner of ONTV who sacked Issa first.
The specter of the conspiracy
The specter of our election conspiracy has been haunting the political sphere for months already. Although few ever spell it out in the media (but everyone talks about it nonehteless), you still meet allover the media in the méconnaissance form that I discussed before. You see it in, for example, the mounting tensions between the Wafd and the Brotherhood. For several months already the Brotherhood has been proposing all sorts of election alliances with Wafd (to neutralize it), but the Wafd rejected them with strange confidence, acting like someone who knows that he will win. You see it, again, in the Brotherhood’s erratic attempts to blackmail the regime to stop its new game by boosting Elbaradei’s support. Elbaradei would’ve died out had the Brotherhood not beefed up his protests and collected signatures for him (about 90% of his signatures). They too act as if they know that they will be kicked out, and they tried to use their popular muscle to stop it after failing to reach a coalition deal with the Wafd.
More importantly, top officials reiterate it almost everyday. Let me note three telling cases. First, Safwat Al-Sharif, the ruling party’s Vice President and President of the Upper-House in the parliament, assured us a month ago that the Brotherhood’s success in 2005 will “not repeat again” because the people now know their reality, without saying much about this reality. The point seems to be that the people know that they’re no-good for some reason, when in fact they were not even tested. Secondly, Fathi Sorour, the President of the Lower-House also predicted that the Brotherhood will do very badly in the elections, but this time because it has become illegal to mix religion and politics in Egypt (meaning that they won’t score votes because they won’t be able to use religion). Thirdly, minister Mofeed Shihab again predicted the brotherhood’s demise, time because people used to vote for them only as a protest against the government.
Like this we have three different senior officials predicting the demise of the Brotherhood for three very different reasons, none of which makes any sense (e.g. if they win because of protest voting, then they should get even more of it today). The point is that they know well that the Brotherhood will lose because it lost popularity for reasons that could be worked out later. This doesn’t come without Freudian slips, however. Just yesterday Ali Al-Deen Hilal, one of the most prominent figures in the ruling party, slammed the Americans for pushing for free elections in Egypt, stating that the US is pushing for would result in the creation of a theocracy in Egypt (i.e. the Brotherhood will take over). As such, the Brotherhood has become so unpopular that they will lose the coming elections very badly, but their extreme unpopularity can still lead them to win any free elections in the country. That’s the strange wisdom that one reaches after living too long with elections organized by deranged conspiracy narratives, it seems.
In the mean time, the same officials have been polishing the Wafd as if it were a very serious contender for the ruling party, when it’s hardly present on the ground. Sorour went as far as propose that the Wafd out of all the ruling party’s contenders is not very far from the National Democratic Party, the ironic name that the ruling party gives to itself. In any case, these are but salient examples from a much bigger sea of official propaganda that tells us that the Brotherhood is over and the Wafd is to be feared. The reason for so varies from one source to the other, as we’ve seen; but my favorite is an argument that the official press loves to repeat nowadays about how the Brotherhood is over because people now know their evil reality after a recent TV series has exposed their truth (it was the most expensive series in TV history).
Evidently the specter of our conspiracy story is all over the place even if people need to talk about it only obliquely. Remember that not recognising it is part of what it is. Thus very few spell it out like Rif’at Al-Said, the president of Al-Tagamo’ party. His motives and disturbing history aside, the man bluntly stated that the Wafd made a deal with the regime to get rid of the Brotherhood, and declared his intentions to halt all forms of cooperation with it as a result--which he didn’t honor, as usual. It goes without saying that the same story organizes the Wafd’s reactions too. For instance, a week after talking about how their money and human resources will assure them an unprecedented victory (see above), Lakah came out to tell us, again, that the Wafd is about to fight a “historical battle” to make unprecedented victory. Nothing in the Wafd’s power on the ground suggests so, as said; it’s at best empty propaganda to prepare us for the new rig that the Wafd thinks will bring it on top. Besides, none of the other parties shares this optimism—they all fear that the elections will be badly rigged. Only the Wafd is appeares so confident. It was interesting to see this statement making Al-Masry Al-Youm’s main headline for the day, nonetheless—as if it were a big revelation. (Al-Masry Al-Youm has been running at least three times more content about elections than other papers are willing to, always framing it as exciting revelations when most of it is banal;see discussions about Issa above). In similar vein, we started to see bloggers speaking about a sudden and amazing surge in the Wafd’s popularity because of its new leader. So we now have blog-posts carrying titles like, “Al-Badawi Receives a Legendary Reception in Port Said;” (ironically, the word “legendary” is quite apt here).
[to be continued/completed here]