Abstract
Between the two revolutionary sequences of January 25, 2011 and June 30, 2013, five elections were held in Egypt. These elections were intended to play a pivotal role in the transition to democracy by providing Egypt with regularly elected institutions and validating the transfer of power from the army to civilian politicians. The lifespan of each of these institutions, however, was ultimately truncated, either through judicial decisions or, more frequently, by a decree from the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). It was in this way that the legal consequences of the referendum held on March 19, 2011—which was supposed to amend the 1971 Constitution by providing a provisional constitutional framework during the transitional period—were nullified several days later by the “constitutional declaration” of March 30. The People’s Assembly elected in January 2012 was similarly dissolved by a Supreme Constitutional Court ruling on June 14, 2012. And on July 3, 2013, the minister of defense, Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi, relieved President Mohammed Morsi, who had been duly elected in June 2012, of his functions before dissolving the Consultative Assembly (Majlis al-Shura) that the voters had chosen in February 2012 and suspending the Constitution, which had just been approved by referendum the previous December.
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Notes
“Founding elections” are generally defined as the first competitive multiparty elections held after a period of authoritarian rule in order to fill national-level official positions. Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 57.
Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems. A Framework for Analysis (Essex: ECPR Press, 2005), pp. 252–254.
Sandrine Gamblin (ed.), Contours et dé tours du politique en Égypte. Les é lections de 1995 (Paris: L’Harmattan/Cedej, 1997);
Sarah Ben Nefissa and Ala’ Al-din Arafat, Vote et démocratie dans l’Égypte contemporaine (Paris: IRD/Karthala, 2005); Florian Kohstall and Frédéric Vairel (eds.), “Fabrique des é lections,” Égypte. Monde arabe, vol. 3, no. 7 (2011). The issue is available at http://ema.revues.org/2958 (accessed March 2, 2015).
Clément Steuer, “Les Partis politiques égyptiens dans la Révolution,” Année du Maghreb, vol. 8, (2012): 181–192.
Regarding the various Egyptian Salafi organizations and their corresponding political parties, see Stéphane Lacroix, Sheikhs and Politicians: Inside the New Egyptian Salafism (Doha: Brookings Doha Center, 2012).
May Kassem, In the Guise of Democracy. Governance in Contemporary Egypt (London: Ithaca Press, 1999), p. 104 ff. For more details, see also Basil Ramsès, “Le Ta gammu’ et les élections ou la conception du parlementarisme chez un parti de gauche,” in Gamblin (ed.), Contours et détours du politique en Égypte, pp. 165–195.
See also Amr Abdul Rahman, “The Opposition Parties Crisis or the Crisis of Liberal Democracy,” in Enrique Klaus and Shaymaa Hassabo (eds), Chroniques égyptiennes 2006 (Cairo: Éditions du CEDEJ, 2007), pp. 143–174.
For an overview of the history of the Egyptian communist party since the 1960s, see ’Abd Al-Ghafar Shukr et al., Al-Ahzab al-siyasiyya wa-azma al-ta‘addudiya fi Misr (Political parties and the crisis of diversity in Egypt) (Cairo: Arab and African Research Center, 2010), pp. 116–121.
It is worth noting that democratic transitions usually give rise to a divide between partisans of the old order and their opponents. On this point, see Mariano Torcal and Scott Mainwaring, “The Political Recrafting of Social Bases of Party Competition: Chile, 1973–95,” British Journal of Political Science, vol. 33, no. 1 (2003): 55–84.
The few studies on this subject focus on the importance of the colonial past in the rise of such cleavages. See, in particular, Moncef Djaziri, “La Problé matique partisane dans les systèmes politiques du Maghreb. Relance des études comparatives,” Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord, vol. 34 (1995): 423–449.
Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, “Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignments: An Introduction,” in S. M. Lipset and S. Rokkan (eds), Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives (New York: Free Press, 1967), pp. 1–64.
Clément Steuer, “Le Printemps des partis? Le rôle des organisations partisanes é gyptiennes dans les élections legislatives,” Confluences Méditerranée, vol. 82 (2012): 91–105.
Gary Reich, “The Evolution of New Party Systems: Are Early Elections Exceptional?” Electoral Studies, vol. 23 (2004): 235–250.
Regarding the importance of the religious cleavage in several Western democracies, see in particular Arend Lijphart, “Religious vs. Linguistic vs. Class Voting: The Crucial Experiment of Comparing Belgium, Canada, South Africa, and Switzerland,” American Political Science Review, vol. 73, no. 2 (1979): 159–182;
Richard Rose and Derek Urwin, “Social Cohesion, Political Parties and Strains in Regimes,” Comparative Political Studies, vol. 2 (1969): 7–67.
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Steuer, C. (2016). The Role of Elections: The Recomposition of the Party System and the Hierarchization of Political Issues. In: Rougier, B., Lacroix, S. (eds) Egypt’s Revolutions. The Sciences Po Series in International Relations and Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-56322-4_5
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