State of DeNile Part II: Why the Egyptian Supreme Court Ruled that the Egyptian Parliament is Unconstitutional

*

Adam L. Silverman, PhD**

Now that I've got a bit more time***, I wanted to follow up on the breaking news type post I did earlier about the Egyptian Supreme Court Ruling.  If you click through to the BBC article I linked to, you'll see towards the bottom that it provides the Egyptian Supreme Court's rationale for, essentially, invalidating the last Egyptian parliamentary election, which for all intents and purposes brings down the government and forces new elections.  The BBC reported that:  "The court had been considering the validity of last year's parliamentary election, because some of the seats were contested on a proportional list system, with others on the first-past-the-post system.  It decided that the election law had allowed parties to compete for the one third of seats reserved  for independent candidates."

So what exactly is a first past the post and proportional list election?  It is a really funky hybrid of an open list system - any one can run for office and if you get the most votes (either plurality or majority depending on the rules) you win.  This works even if one is party affiliated.  This is, with a few tweaks, what we use here in the US for our legislatures and it is what is used in a lot of other places regardless of type of legislature.  A proportional list system, however, apportions seats based on the percentage of vote for party.  The parties produce lists, numbered from one through the upper limit for the legislative chamber (usually a parliament) and if they get 40% of the vote, the first 40% of the people on their lists get a seat in the legislature.  Often there is a minimum threshhold, so if a party gets fewer than say 10 or 20% of the votes, none of its members will be seated.  An open list (first past the post)/ proportional representation system was the wacked out system the Iraqis decided on in 2008 for their provincial elections that didn't happen until 2009.  In this system, which is what the Egyptian Supreme Court just nullified, the problem is that even if you are first past the post running on the open list side, if someone is on a party list, and based on the proportional vote that party gets to seat its percentage of candidates, you can loose, even though you've won more votes, because the proportional representation portion can push your opponent over the top.  If reading this has given you a nosebleed you ARE NOT ALONE!!!  It almost drove the Awakenings guys out in Anbar back into insurgency in 2009, when it looked like they were going to have seeming first past the post electoral victories nullified by the proportional representation results of their opponents.  This was fortunately settled before too much bloodshed occurred, but basically it is a really bad system to use. The only place it has ever been used effectively is in Switzerland.  In the other places its been tried, such as Brazil, Italy, and Indonesia - it has not produced the proper electoral results (but given that it seems to be a Rube Goldberg type electoral system it may still have produced the desired political results).  If you want to have a better understanding of how it fits together, here's the UN Fact Sheet I referenced when I was writing the briefing papers to explain this for my BCT commander in Iraq.  Basically no one had heard of this before the Iraqis came up with the idea, so no one had any way of knowing it needed to be stopped until it was too late - not that we could've done much about it anyway.

* The image is of The Question.  COL Lang asked me to either start using an avatar or a picture of myself and when given a choice decided the faceless Question was the better choice.  For full citation: The Question was originally a Charleton Comics character, later acquired by DC Comics, and created by Steve Ditko.  He is faceless (its a hi tech synthetic flesh mask), something of a conspiracy theorist detective/information overload kind of character, was originally an Objectivist, but ultimately became more of an Asian philosophy/martial arts sort of type.  This image is taken from the cartoon representation from the early to mid 2000s.  I am not actually faceless, am not an Objectivist, do study Asian philosophy and actually run the aikido dojo at USAWC, was not created by Steve Ditko (as far as my parents told me), but do love conspiracy theory documentaries, as well as the ones on Bigfoots (or is that Bigfeet...), and the hallmark of a good cultural advisor is to live on information overload.  For more Question info - the wikipedia entry is pretty good.  So I'll be using this as an avatar going forward, provided DC comics doesn't send me a cease and desist notice...

** Adam L. Silverman, PhD is the Culture and Foreign Language Advisor at the US Army War College (USAWC).  The views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of USAWC and/or the US Army.

*** By more time I mean just that.  I've been providing a ton of operational support over the past six months and have been just swamped.  Things should, hopefully, slow down a bit in the next ten days or so so I can spend a bit more time here at SST.

Comments

[HankP]

So they made the right decision but at a bad time?

[Adam L Silverman]

Pretty much so. Basically the nub of that part of the ruling was that open list/first past the post seats had gone to proportional representation candidates. Anther interesting part of the ruling is that they ruled that the de-Mubarakification law, banning anyone from the previous government from running was also a no go. This adds another candidate to the presidential run off. What I find interesting is the parallels that exist here with the Iraqi election laws of 2008 and the de-Baathification law. Makes me wonder if there's some consultant out there on the former we're not aware of promoting this type of thing. That makes me wonder why...

[Matthew]

Adam: This analysis would be lot more convincing if the Egyptian "judiciary" were not tools of the Egyptian dictatorship.

The Egyptians had a revolution. These judges are vestiges of the Mubarak regime.

If King George III's appointed judges were still interpreting the US Consitution after American Revolution, would we accept their rulings?

[HankP]

Adam -

What do you think the chances are that this could move to a Turkey type situation, with the military gradually allowing political freedoms except for Islamic parties? Or does that require an Egyptian Kemal first?

[Matthew]

People seem forget that Turkey's economy boomed only after the Islamist party came to power.

Coups, torture, and a stagnant economy are the legacies of the Turkish military.

[Lars Moller-Rasmussen]

Matthew,

Actually,the Egyptian judiciary used to have a reputation for some degree of independence of the Mubarak regime. Before the fall of Mubarak, opposition parties traditionally asked the regime to the continue the practice of having judges preside over polling stations. This was to prevent the ballot box-stuffing carried out by government-party activists from getting out of hand.

Stuffing ballot-boxes with fake votes was an efficient means of rigging elections because voter partipation was traditionally very low. Many observers believed it to be only a fraction of the official figures.

[HankP]

Matthew -

I didn't say it was a good or a bad thing, just asking an expert for his opinion.

[turcopolier]

Matthew

Having served with the Turkish military, I may actually know somethig about this. They were the guardians of the Kemalist faith, the main tenets of which were modernity, secularism and rqual rights for women. pl

[Adam L Silverman]

Matthew,

The analysis of the type of election, which was the whole point of the post, is accurate. Do I believe that the Egyptian Supreme Court handed down the ruling for purely judicial, constitutional, and apolitical reasons? No, just like I don't believe that our Supreme Court hands down rulings for those reasons either.

As to your remarks about Turkey: the military's "traditional" (as in having done it like four times) role as the last preserver of Turkey's secular Kemalist system is both blessing and course. Four times they've intervened, which from our understanding of civil-military relations is not what one wants to happen, but that said, all four times they've set up the process to restore civilian control and abided by it. And I've served with Turkish officers the last two years, though in my case it was to serve as faculty instructor, so while I have no where near the breath or depth of COL Lang's experience with this, my experience is that they are proud of this historical guardianship, but are also dedicated officers that understand that the civilian government is supposed to be in charge.

[Adam L Silverman]

HankP:I don't think we'll see that - Egypt is not Turkey. And that's my take on this whole Arab Spring thing. Aside from chronological, and in some cases geographic, proximity, each of these (series of) events can only be understood in the context of the society it is occurring in. Egypt, while more similar to Tunisia or Libya than it is to Iowa (to pick a place that it is, indeed, very different from) still has its own unique society and the political, social, religious, and economic institutions and structures have shaped Egyptian national and sub-national identities in a way that what happens in Egypt is going to be different than what happens in Syria once we get beyond the most superficial similarities (repression, crackdown, poor economy, etc). So its a great question, but I'm not sure if an answer can be extracted from comparison with Turkey.

[William R. Cumming]

My question is largely one of ignorance. Why have Egypt, Iran, and Turkey largely operated since the end of WWI and WWII to largely focus on their internal dynamics and not tried to dominate the areas of greatest interest to them including neighboring nation-states? Or have they done so and I just missed it? Only Iran has oil but all three have talented populations and critical geographic locations for the GAME of THRONES! IMO of course.

[turcopolier]

WRC

Turkey is a special case. It was one of Ataturk's precepts that Turkey should abandon the Ottoman tradition and concentrate on building a nation within the borders that he won in battle and diplomacy. to that end he had bargained successfully wiht the balkan countries for the transfer of Muslim populations to Turkey. Following this tradition Turkey minded its own business until the accession of the present government began to make a shift in policy.

Egypt has been obsessed with Israel in one way or anotherr since the foundation of the Jewish state. It still is. Israel is all there is of Egypt's foreign issues.

Iran is s multi-nationel ecumenical empire. Under the shah (emperor) attention was inward focussed on development. The mullahs have a wider focus but they started late in the GOT. pl