Egypt polls will have wide impact
Early results indicate that Egypt’s first real free election last Monday and Tuesday, whose impartiality was attested to by international observers, has thrown up the contours of a new map of politics in the Arab world (West Asia and North Africa), a sensitive oil-rich region that automatically commands
international attention. The reverberations of the new mood, underpinned by the endorsement of the Islamist credo in an unprecedented way, are likely to be felt on all continents. Different shades of political Islam have notched an unambiguous triumph in Egypt. The liberals have been put to flight although it is they who had set the stage for the Tahrir Square uprising in Cairo 10 months ago.
Only a third of the voting districts went to the polls on November 28 and 29, but these take into account the bustling centres of Cairo, Alexandria and Port Said. Going by the predictions made by the well-known Al-Ahram newspaper on the basis of the available results, the Islamists are likely to control two-thirds of the seats in Parliament. A mild form of Islamism has already triumphed in Tunisia, but Egypt, the cultural and political heartbeat of the Arab world, is something else. The massive transformation of legit politics — sanctified by a regular victory in a regular election — in the largest country of the Arab world in population numbers will impact politics in the world of Islam in innumerable ways. This is what the vastly influential Egyptian radical Islamist thinker Syed Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood may have dreamed of 60 years ago.
In West Asia policy terms, Israel is likely to be on the tenterhooks. With the Palestinian Hamas’ ideological twin, the Muslim Brotherhood (through the Freedom and Justice Party), and its more extreme versions calling the shots in Cairo, the 1978 Israel-Egypt peace deal will be on the ventilator. Tel Aviv could ratchet up its already too high defence budget, creating a scare in West Asia, especially Tehran. It is possible that it may be persuaded to make conciliatory moves towards Palestine President Mahmoud Abbas who heads the secular Fatah movement, and that could be productive. The powerful Gulf sheikhdoms, with a modernising streak, may also now have to look over their shoulder. It is not unlikely that the Taliban in the AfPak theatre will be boosted, with implications for politics in Pakistan and also for its non-state actors or terrorists. Within Egypt there lies a struggle ahead between the Army and the broad-spectrum victorious Islamists. Western policy-makers may have to deal with people speaking a different language in the Islamic world. India will have to keep an eye out for possible changes in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
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