Fruits & Votes is the Web-log of Matthew S. Shugart ("MSS"), Professor of Political Science, University of California, Davis.
Perspectives on electoral systems, constitutional design, and policy around the world, based primarily on my research interests.
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The draft Egyptian constitution is now available in English. As expected, it establishes a semi-presidential system.
One oddity that jumped out at me: it has a term of office for the House of Representatives (5 years) that is longer than that for the President (4). I can’t recall ever seeing that before.
The House can withdraw its confidence from the Prime Minister by absolute majority of all members, and upon proposal by one tenth of the membership (Art. 126). Another odd provision is that it seems a successful vote of no-confidence only affects the tenure of the PM himself unless “the Cabinet announced its solidarity with him before the vote,” in which case the whole cabinet must resign.
The president appoints the prime minister, who then has 30 days to form a cabinet. If this proposed cabinet does not obtain confidence, “the President shall appoint another Prime Minister from the party that holds the majority of seats in the House of Representatives” (this stricture is not imposed on the initial appointment). If this PM also fails to gain confidence (how could he, given the majority-party stricture, or maybe the Arabic actually means “plurality”), then the House itself appoints a PM. If that PM also somehow fails to assemble a cabinet that can gain confidence, there must be a new House election within 60 days. (These provisions are somewhat akin to those of the Polish constitution.)
I do not see a specific provision related to the resignation of a cabinet, aside from those regarding withdrawal of parliamentary confidence. The silence of the constitution on whether the president can force the resignation of a PM leads me to believe this constitution should be classified as president-parliamentary, rather than premier-presidential.
The president may dissolve the House, though only after calling and winning a referendum to that effect. If he loses the referendum, the president must resign (Art. 127).
The constitution, unsurprisingly, grants protection to the armed forces. Not only is the military singled out as having “protected” the revolution in one of the first statements of the constitution, but also Art. 194 says “The Armed Forces shall belong to the people” and Art. 195 says that “The Minister of Defense is the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, appointed from among its officers” (my emphasis). It seems to me that the military is thus made essentially above the law, or at least not subordinate to the president or legislature.
In matters of religion and state, God is mentioned in the second line of the preamble, Art. 2 says “Islam is the religion of the state and Arabic its official language. Principles of Islamic Sharia are the principal source of legislation” and Art. 3 says “The canon principles of Egyptian Christians and Jews are the main source of legislation for their personal status laws, religious affairs, and the selection of their spiritual leaders.”
A referendum on the draft constitution is set for 15 December.
Article 3 The practice of Christianity and Judaism
Persons embracing Christianity and Judaism shall have the right to revert to their respective religious laws in matters relevant to personal affairs, the practice of religious (affairs) or (rituals), and the nomination of spiritual leaders.
On the other hand, there is this (in Art. 2):
Islam is the religion of the State and Arabic is the official language. The principles of Islamic Law are the main source of legislation and Al-Azhar is the final authority in the interpretation thereof.
and this:
Article 4 Al-Azhar
Al-Azhar is an independent Islamic authority, headquartered in Cairo, and responsible for the affairs of the Islamic nation and the world as a whole. [...]
(Egypt’s draft, at least the English translation posted, does not yet define the system of government.)
Egypt’s Constitutional Court has ruled unconstitutional the nominal tier of last year’s legislative election– the 1/3 of seats that were elected by majority in 2-seat constituencies. (heard on BBC radio; news outlets, e.g. Reuters, are just getting this out)
These seats were dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood.
The court also ruled against a law, passed by this parliament, that would have disqualified Ahmed Shafik, from the presidential runoff.
It appears the runoff in Egypt’s presidential election will be between two candidates who combined for less than half the votes cast–out of a turnout of well under half the voters.
Mohammed Morsi of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party polled around 26% in the two-day first round. Ahmed Shafiq, Mubarak’s last prime minister, came second with 23% when 90% of the votes had been counted. (The Guardian)
It would seem that one would not want to wait until the week of a presidential election–or worse still, between rounds of said election–to define the powers of the president-to-be. But then there is Egypt.
I believe it is unusual for a president to be elected before a constitution–even a provisional one–has been enacted. Normally, there is a constituent assembly, during which time a provisional government remains in place, as in Tunisia currently, or else a constitution is negotiated prior to any elections (as with several Eastern European and African transitions of the 1990s). In fact, the only other examples that come to mind of presidential elections preceding a determination of presidential powers are Nicaragua (1984) and Romania (1990). At least in the latter case, the the first president was elected to only a two-year term (as was the concurrently elected constituent assembly).
Meanwhile, apparently the voter turnout in this week’s first round of the presidential elation was only 50% or even just 40%. Either figure would be really, really low for a first presidential election in a transition to democracy–or an alleged such transition.
This is not the first time that the Egyptian transition has prompted me to fret over issues of sequencing or turnout.
Judge Magdy el-Agaty of the High Administrative Court said the elaborate system that apportioned seats among individuals and political parties violated the constitution. He referred parts of the election law to the Supreme Constitutional Court for a final judgement…
The parliamentary election… was held under an elaborate system under which a third of seats were allocated to individuals and two thirds to political parties.
Agaty said this ratio violated the constitution and half of seats should have been reserved for individuals. He also said parties should not have been permitted to field candidates for the seats reserved for individuals.
“The court views that allowing political parties to run for independent seats violates the principles of constitutional equality and has doubtful constitutionality,” Agaty said in the ruling, which was handed down Monday and released Tuesday.
Only four Christians won seats through the party-list system and three have reached the runoff stage on the individual seats. This number is not likely to increase dramatically in the next two stages, as the next two stages are taking place in governates with fewer Christian votes and candidates. The overall parliament will have fewer than ten Christians elected among its 498 members.
Women will also win few seats.
While the electoral system required parties to include a minimum of one woman in their lists, nearly all of them chose to put that women near the end of the list, and in the case of the Salafists, the very last name, ensuring they wouldn’t win.
Tadros also points to some important questions regarding runoffs in the two-seat districts. For instance,
What kind of coalitions will be built? In cases where a non-Islamist and a Salafist are running against two Muslim Brotherhood members, do they forge an alliance or are their ideological differences too deep to allow them from taking the right step electorally?
Press coverage of this week’s voting in Egypt has tended to refer to the events as the “second round” of voting.
This is misleading. The term to use when a country (or other jurisdiction) sees some districts vote on one date and others vote on a later date should be “stage” not “round”. The use of “stage” is standard in India, a country where both the federal and state electoral processes take place in different clusters of districts on different dates.
The terminology being widely used for Egypt is all the more confusing when each stage has two rounds! Many districts in Egypt will not have a winner in the initial count of votes, due to rules requiring a majority. There must be a runoff in such districts. This is the true meaning of “second round”.
One might expect that Indian journalists would get this right, but I heard the Indian co-host of BBC’s World Briefing the other day refer to “the second round of voting in Egypt”, notwithstanding that she was actually referring to the first round of the second stage. Soon we will have the second round of the second stage, to be followed by the first round of the third stage…
Andy Reynolds offers a first look at the election in Egypt.
The electoral system used, plus the overall fragmentation, may be leading to significant over-representation of the Islamist parties. Further,
At this early stage it is possible to predict that once the election dust settles in January the Muslim Brotherhood’s FJP will win a comfortable parliamentary majority (perhaps 55-60% of the seats in the People’s Assembly) on approximately 40% of the popular vote… The ‘losers’ in the election system will clearly be the nascent liberal forces…
Andy also has an update on this first stage of voting, following the runoffs in the nominal-tier seats.
Excerpts from a lengthy piece in Ahram on opposition parties’ discontent with the new Egyptian electoral system:
Most political forces in Egypt have sharply criticised a draft law aimed at establishing a new distribution of electoral districts, agreeing that it would make it difficult for citizens to vote and for candidates to organise election campaigns.
For both houses of the legislature–the Peoples Assembly and the Shura Council–the same basic system has been adopted. It is MMM, with two-seat districts in the nominal tier (referred to ” individual candidacy”) and districts of only 4-6 in the party-list tier.
In reaction, political forces, especially secular ones, cried foul that SCAF chose to impose its blueprint on political life. Essam Shiha, a famous lawyer and a Wafd Party activist, argued that “not only has SCAF kept the individual candidacy system, but its draft of the law made it highly difficult for candidates — especially those belonging to newly-formed parties — to compete in the elections.” “It makes the size of districts covered by the party-list system very large, thus making it difficult for candidates of a particular force to compete because they will be forced to extend their campaigns to cover very large areas and in different places with no geographical relationship between them,” argued Shiha, adding that “in North Cairo, for example, the four candidates of each competing party will be forced to campaign in an area including no fewer than five million citizens.”
Shiha also argued that “in a time of security vacuum, it will be highly dangerous to hold the elections of the People’s Assembly and Shura Council on the same day.” “It means that citizens will be exposed to two kinds of election campaigns for the first time on the same day, and they will be expected to elect a large number of deputies for two houses on one day,” said Shiha.
According to the new law, when voters go to the polling stations, they will be faced with two lists of candidates for the People’s Assembly and two for the Shura Council. The first list will include candidates running as individuals and the second those running on a party ticket. Diaa Rashwan, director of Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, said that “the organisation of the elections of the People’s Assembly and Shura Council on the same day will make the voting process very complicated and cumbersome for citizens.”
The absence of consensus between the military and the parties bodes ill for the prospects for democracy in Egypt.
Max Fisher, in The Atlantic, writes about the dangers to Egypt’s (supposed) transition to democracy posed by the electoral system chosen for November’s election.
The system adopted seems to be along the lines of what we discussed here some months ago. A potentially highly majoritarian mixed-member system: a nominal tier with 2-seat districts, and a parallel list tier with an average magnitude of only around 4.
Fisher poses the concern that it could favor the least unpopular of Egypt’s many fledgling parties.
Egypt’s new electoral system will be a mixed-member system with a 50:50 split between its nominal and list tiers (Daily News Egypt, 20 July).
The district magnitude of the nominal tier will remain two, with 126 districts. The list tier will also be districted, with 58 constituencies. The average district magnitude of the list tier thus would work out to barely more than four.
While the article does not discuss the relationship between the two tiers, I will assume it is mixed-member majoritarian (MMM, or “parallel”) in the absence of anything to indicate that the list seats are compensatory (as MMP). Given the low magnitude of the list tier districts, and the use of 2-seat rather than 1-seat districts for the nominal tier, even if it were MMP in form, the proportionality would be minimal. (Assuming the retention of two votes per voter, 2-seat districts mean lower proportionality than 1-seat districts, given plurality or majority formula.)
According to Ahram, 21 July, at least two parties, the Wafd (liberal) and Freedom and Justice (Muslim Brotherhood) have indicated that they would have preferred a pure-list system. “To them, the party-list system forces citizens to elect representatives on the grounds of their political platforms rather than on tribal or familial connections,” according to the article.
The system retains the old requirement that half the seats be reserved for “workers and peasants,” although it is unclear how this applies to the two tiers. Apparently this quota is a constitutional provision. (See previous discussion of how this was applied under the dictatorship.)
The assembly size will be 514, including 10 appointees of the president.
Thanks to Tom Lundberg for sending me the Ahram article link, and Ahwa Talk for the Daily New Egypt link.
Details at Ahwa Talk. The short story is that the proposal would be for a form of MMM. That is, 25% of seats via party lists, but the rest elected by the old (and odd) system that we discussed previously here.
Is Egypt’s revolution, if it ever was one, now officially over?
The results of Saturday’s referendum on amendments to the constitution–seen as a first step towards competitive elections later this year–suggest less than great excitement.
According to Ahram, the turnout was around 41%. Yes, forty one.
Of those who bothered to show up, 77.2% said yes to the amendments.
I wondered how this compared to other referenda on either a new constitution, or amendments to the pre-existing authoritarian one, in past transitions to democracy.
The following is probably missing some key cases. I put it together by perusing my volumes of the Nohlen, et al., data handbooks on Latin America and Africa, as well as some sources on Eastern Europe.*
What this means going forward, I do not know. Various reports said the pro-democracy forces were divided over whether the reforms went far enough to be worthy of a yes vote. However, I did not hear anything about an organized boycott. Yet the yes vote was fairly strong out of those who voted, while the turnout shockingly weak for a country supposedly in the process of a mass-instigated transition to democracy.
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* I did not find any in Eastern Europe that took place prior to democratic elections. However, Poland’s referendum on its constitution in 1993 had a turnout on par with Egypt’s: 42.9. The yes vote was 53.5. Poland was already democratic by this point, having been governed under the interim Little Constitution.
If by my laws you walk, and my commands you keep, and observe them,
then I will give-forth your rains in their set-time,
so that the earth gives-forth its yield
and the trees of the field give-forth their fruit.
--Vayikra 26: 3-4
F&V time: This blog's date function is so set as to start a new day at approximately local sunset.
(Why, if we have "day" and "night," should a new "day" start in the middle of the night?)
FRUITS: Support your local, organic growers; and, plant vines and fig trees and pomegranates for the generations to come...
VOTES: For democratization and full representation, for environmental sustainability, social justice, and peace, always sincerely...
