Election Time

Its election time in Egypt and you know what that means... well it seems to mean election rigging, low voter turnout and a landslide victory for the ruling party, the National Democratic Party.

For those of you who don't know the state of Egypt's government I will do my best to explain what I know. Egypt is a republic and it has a President, Hosni Mubarak who has been president since 1981, and a parliament. The parliment is made up of the People's Assembly and the Shura Council. Altogether there are 578 elected seats and the remaining 138 seats are reserved for Presidential appointment. Now this is obviously an oversimplification of the government system so if you want to know more you should google it. 

Here is a good summary of the current climate in Egypt post elections: http://frontpagemag.com/2010/12/02/egypts-electoral-unrest/

Okay so my experience through this whole thing:

The elections have been a popular discussion topic in class and among Egyptians for the past several months. I am always curious to know who is voting in the elections and who isn't. Let me tell you, hardly anyone is voting. I met one person who voted. Whenever people tell me that they aren't voting in the election I like to hear their reasoning. Sadly its always the same answer, they have lost hope or faith in the election process. Coming from America you always hear about how lucky we are to have the freedom to chose our government so for me it is still hard to figure out how people have lost hope. How did they get to this point? 

I asked one of my friends why she didn't vote and she gave me a list of reasons which basically summed up to why am I going to waste my time to go to a fake election. I still wasn't convinced that not voting is the answer. If the entire country voted, things may not change but I feel it would make it harder for the government to ignore them. However when no one is voting it only makes it easier to rig the elections. Egypt can't continue on this path, there are too many problems plaguing the country and the people need a change. So if there is no  real democratic process to create change and the current state is not sustainable, can we expect to see a revolution?? That would be insane!!!!

But really I don't expect to see any revolutions