Egypt Sets December Presidential Election, With Sisi Set to Retain Power Till 2030

By Staff, Agencies

Egypt will hold a presidential election over three days in December, officials announced Monday, with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi highly likely to remain in power until 2030.

Waleed Hamza, the chairman of the National Election Authority, said the vote will take place on December 10-12, with a runoff on January 8-10 if no candidate secures more than 50 percent of the vote. Egyptian expatriates will vote on December 1-3, and in the runoff on January 5-7, he added.

A handful of politicians have already announced their bids to run for the country’s highest post, but none poses a serious challenge to Sisi, who has been in power since 2014 and has faced criticism from the West over his country’s human rights record.

Sisi, a former defense minister, led the 2013 military overthrow of elected but divisive Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, who was affiliated with Muslim Brotherhood, amid street protests against Morsi’s one-year rule. Since then, authorities have launched a major crackdown on dissent. Thousands of government critics have been silenced or jailed, mainly Islamists but also many prominent secular activists, including many of those behind the 2011 uprising that toppled longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak.

Sisi has not announced his candidacy yet.

He was first elected in 2014 and reelected in 2018 for a second four-year term. Constitutional amendments, passed in a referendum in 2019, added two years to his second term, and allowed him to run for a third, six-year term.

In the 2018 vote, Sisi faced only a little-known politician who joined the race at the last minute to spare the government the embarrassment of a one-candidate election after several hopefuls were forced out or arrested.

The board of trustees of National Dialogue, a forum announced by Sisi last year to help chart Egypt’s roadmap through recommendations, called for reforms to ensure a “multicandidate and competitive” presidential election.

In a statement last week, the trustees demanded that all candidates and opposition parties be allowed to interact directly with the public.

“The state institutions and agencies are required to keep an equal distance from all presidential candidates so as to safeguard their legal and constitutional rights as well as equal opportunity to all of them,” the trustees said.

The board of trustees also called on the government to accelerate the release of critics held in pretrial detention and to amend the relevant legislation, which it said established “a sort of penal punishment without a court verdict.”