CAIRO (AP) — The Election Commission says former army chief Field Marshal Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi won Egypt’spresidential elections by a landslide victory of 96.9 percent of the vote, with turnout 47.45 percent.
Anwar el-Assi, the commission’s president, said el-Sissi received 23.78 million votes, while his sole rival, leftist politician Hamdeen Sabahi, got 3 percent of the vote.
After the announcement, several hundred people gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square set off fireworks, cheered and sang pro-military songs.
El-Sissi’s victory was never in doubt, but the career infantry officer had pushed for a massive turnout as well to bestow legitimacy on his ouster last July of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi and the ensuing crackdown on his Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist supporters.
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Like my mother used to say: “Everything old is new again…”
Yep, they traded in Mubarak, a career military officer for al-Sissi, a career military officer.
And yet, the Egyptians still seem so fickle…It’s a strongman one year, and a religious zealot the next. Maybe they could keep a lookout for a bookish type…someone from academia perhaps, or a do like the rest of the world and stick an oligarch in as a placeholder until at least the next coup.
It appears that Egypt has gone full circle. A lot of anguish to go through for replacing one strongman with the next.
The impression that I came away with on the “Egypt Spring” was that the Egyptian people saw the results of the democratically held election, didn’t understand what went wrong and didn’t have the patience to work within the system to change it. As ATL says, they’ve now come full circle. And this is the way things will stay in that country.