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Security tight for second round of voting in Egypt

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October 30, 2000 

ZAGAZIG, Egypt (AP) - Trucks filled with riot police were parked near polling stations in Egypt Sunday as voters elected a parliament.

The tight security, which included scores of plainclothes police officers on the streets of Zagazig, 65 kilometers (40 miles) northeast of Cairo, followed violence during earlier voting that left one person dead amid charges of fraud and intimidation.

But there was no sign of violence as voting got off to a slow start in Zagazig.

A total of 134 seats were being contested in Sunday's voting in southern and eastern Egypt. This second stage of voting followed polling Oct. 18 in northern Egypt. A third and last stage is scheduled Nov. 8 in central Egypt and the new 454-member legislature is to convene in mid-December.

For the first time, the election was staggered to allow a small pool of judges time to travel across the country to supervise voting. In the past, civil servants had augmented the judicial supervisors. That practice was declared unconstitutional this year following widespread charges of vote-rigging in the last elections in 1995 . The 1995 elections were also among the most violent in Egypt's history.

Civil rights groups welcomed the switch to having only judges supervise what happens inside the polling booths, but some have expressed concern that the Ministry of Interior, which is controlled by the ruling National Democratic Party, is still responsible for compiling voter lists and transporting ballots from the polling stations to counting areas.

The NDP denied the rigging charges in 1995, but courts ruled there had been fraud in many cases.

President Hosni Mubarak's NDP emerged from the first round of this year's voting with 118 of the 150 seats contested.

Opposition parties won four, independents endorsed by the banned Muslim Brotherhood won another six and other independents won 20. Voting in a two-seat constituency in Alexandria was indefinitely postponed after a brotherhood-backed candidate complained she did not get a fair chance because police arrested several of her campaign workers.

The brotherhood, considered Egypt's largest Muslim political group, won only one seat in 1995. It supports nominally independent candidates because it is outlawed. Its platform is to run the country as an Islamic state.

The ruling NDP has such a stranglehold on Egyptian politics that isn't unusual for scores of nominal independents to declare themselves NDP members after victories - as happened after the first round this year.

But several prominent NDP politicians were defeated in the first round, an indication of voter discontent with a party seen as moving slowly on economic and human rights reforms. Recent Palestinian-Israel has also become a campaign issue, with thousands of Egyptians protesting in support of the Palestinians and calling on their government - one of only two in the Arab world with a peace treaty with Israel - to take a harder line on the Jewish state.

But with no viable opposition, the NDP is expected to again emerge as by far the largest bloc in parliament. The party held 97 percent of the 454 seats in the departing parliament.

A total of 4,259 candidates have registered to run for 444 seats across Egypt. The 10 remaining seats are filled by presidential appointment.

The NDP fielded 444 candidates and opposition parties 428. The balance, including those backed by the Muslim Brotherhood or allied with the NDP, are running as independents.