Tahrir celebrates martyrs 62% of voters cast their ballots and Islamists to win election

More than eight million Egyptians voted in the opening round of their first free vote in six decades in what the election chief said on Friday was a turnout of 62 percent, far higher than in the rigged polls of deposed President Hosni Mubarak

The Muslim Brotherhood’s party and its ultra-conservative Salafi rivals looked set to top the polls, to the alarm of many at home and abroad. Moderate Islamists have won elections in Tunisia and Morocco in the past two months.

The emergence of ambitious Salafi parties is one of the starkest measures of change in post-Mubarak Egypt.

The world is watching the election for pointers to the future in Egypt, the most populous Arab nation and one hitherto seen as a firm U.S. ally committed to preserving its peace treaty with Israel and fighting Islamist militancy.

Abdul Moez Ibrahim, the head of the election committee, joked that the turnout was the highest in any Egyptian election “since the pharaohs”. It was even greater than in the “forgeries of the past elections”, he added, referring to the Mubarak era.

Protesters were out again in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Friday to mourn 42 people killed in the 10 days before the vote at rallies demanding the generals who replaced Mubarak give way to civilian rule.

“Without Tahrir, we wouldn’t have had these elections,” said Mohamed Gad in the square that cradled the revolt. “God willing, the elections will succeed and the revolution will triumph.”

But many of the young people who took to the streets early this year now fear their revolution risks being stolen, either by the army rulers or by well-organised Islamist parties.

“NO DEALS”

Ibrahim announced the results of only a handful of clear-cut victories for individual candidates, with most going to run-offs next week, and gave no figures for party lists in the polls.

He said four candidates, two from the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) and two liberals, won over 50 percent of votes for outright victory out of 56 individual seats at stake.

The FJP said 39 of its candidates would fight run-off races. The party dominates a coalition with other smaller parties. Their coalition will be contesting 45 seats.

Yousry Hamad, a senior official of the Salafi Nour Party said 26 of its contenders were involved in run-offs, 24 of them going head-to-head with FJP candidates.

“We will go into the run-offs with all our might and there will be no deals with anyone. We will aim to do better than we have already,” Nour leader Emad Abdel Ghafour told Reuters.

In Egypt’s complex election process, two-thirds of the 498 seats will go proportionately to party lists, with the rest to individual candidates.

The Muslim Brotherhood, banned but semi-tolerated under Mubarak, has said its FJP expects to win 43 percent of party list votes in the first stage, building on the Islamist group’s decades of grassroots social and religious work.

But the Brotherhood’s website also forecast that the Salafi al-Nour party would gain 30 percent of the vote, a shock for some Egyptians, especially minority Christian Copts, who fear it will try to impose strict Islamic codes on society.

Nour said on Thursday it expected 20 percent of the vote.

More secular-minded Egyptian parties, some of which were only formed after Mubarak’s fall, had always feared that they would not have enough time to put up a credible challenge to their experienced and better-funded Islamist rivals.

source: REUTERS