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Egypt Opposition Gears Up After Constitution Passes
(about 5 hours later)
CAIRO — An Islamist-backed constitution was approved on Saturday, propelling Egypt’s deeply divided political factions into a new phase in the battle over the country’s future.
CAIRO — Egyptians approved an Islamist-backed constitution, state news media said Sunday, and the headlines made clear that the political brawl about it has only begun.
After millions went to the polls for the final round of a referendum, the charter’s approval, which had been predicted by all sides, marked an important milestone in Egypt’s chaotic two-year transition to democracy. A “yes” vote of 70 percent on Saturday brought the overall margin of passage to about 64 percent, according to the Muslim Brotherhood.
“The People Sided With Democracy,” the flagship state newspaper, Al Ahram, declared in a headline.
But the hastily drafted document leaves unresolved many questions about the character of that democracy, including the Islamists’ commitment to individual freedoms and their opposition’s willingness to accept the results of the political process without recourse to violent street protests.
“Wholesale Violations,” the largest independent daily, Al Masry Al Youm, said.
The charter’s path to the referendum has also taken Egypt to the brink of civil strife, exposing the alienation of the Christian minority, the political opposition’s refusal to negotiate and the Muslim Brotherhood’s willingness to rely on authoritarian tactics.
Passage of the constitution begins what its supporters call the first experiment in Islamist democracy, and its results will be watched across the Arab world. Its approval is a victory for President Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm, who had sought to temporarily suspend the authority of the Egyptian courts in order to prevent rulings that he feared might block the referendum.
How those tensions are managed and the new constitution is put into effect will determine whether Egypt returns to stability or plunges further into discord, and much of the region is watching the outcome of that definitive Arab Spring revolt.
But a backlash against Mr. Morsi and his Islamist allies over their authoritarian tactics has led to new pressure to rebut charges that they intend to exploit loopholes in the charter in order to move Egypt toward theocracy.
Neither supporters nor opponents of the charter said they expected an immediate end to the partisan feuding that has torn at the country in the month before the vote.
In a news conference on Sunday, opposition leaders called the charter illegitimate and vowed to use any peaceful means available to prevent it from being carried out. “This is a constitution that lacks the most important prerequisite for a constitution: consensus,” said Hamdeen Sabahi, a leftist and former presidential candidate. “This means we can’t build our future based on this text at all.”
The Islamists allied with President Mohamed Morsi said they intended to rebuild trust by using the new charter as a tool to battle remnants of former President Hosni Mubarak’s government. Old laws and prosecutors, the Islamists say, are protecting loyalists and holdovers while they obstruct change from within the bureaucracy and conspire with the opposition to stir up unrest. Leaders of the anti-Islamist opposition, however, said they hoped to carry the momentum of their struggle against the draft constitution into the parliamentary elections set to be held two months from now. They accused the Islamists of using the specter of a struggle against remnants of Mr. Mubarak’s government as a pretext to demonize the opposition and take over the machinery of the state.
Mr. Sabahi and other political leaders accused the Islamists of manipulating religious faith to rally support for the constitution in an effort to increase their own power and to “support capitalist interests.” The opposition also vowed to carry the momentum from the fight against the charter into the parliamentary elections.
“If we accept the legitimacy of working within the system, they have to agree that the opposition is legitimate,” said Amr Moussa, a former foreign minister under Mr. Mubarak and a presidential candidate who has re-emerged as an opposition leader during the constitutional debate. “The ancien régime is finished. They are imagining things. They are imagining that if you say no to the constitution, as I have done, then you are part of a conspiracy to topple them.”
“We will confirm to them that deceiving in the name of religion is done once and for all,” the main opposition coalition, the National Salvation Front, said in a statement.
Both sides of the ideological divide appeared to dig in.
Amr Hamzawy, a political scientist and liberal political leader, said the size of the vote against the constitution was a measure of the opposition’s growing clout. “We have a majority that isn’t big, and a minority that isn’t small. This means there is an evident division in society,” he said, adding, “We feel we’ve made a major achievement.”
“A crack has emerged in Egypt; there’s a gap, there’s blood and deaths, there’s extremism,” said Ahmed Maher, who helped jump-start the revolution as a leader of the secular April 6 Youth Group and then served as a delegate in the constituent assembly that wrote a draft of the charter. “Something has happened between Egyptians that would make the results bad no matter what the outcome” of the constitutional vote, he said, predicting further clashes before the parliamentary elections.
About 64 percent of voters in the two-part referendum approved the new charter, Egyptian state media reported Sunday, citing preliminary results. About 57 percent voted yes in last weekend’s first phase, which included Cairo, where a sizable majority voted no. In the more rural precincts that voted on Saturday, more than 70 percent voted yes, outlining Egypt’s cultural divide.
Adding to the uncertainty about what may come next, Mr. Morsi’s vice president, Mahmoud Mekki, resigned Saturday. The draft constitution would eliminate his position, and Mr. Mekki, a former judge, said that he had originally submitted his resignation in early November before a series of crises postponed it.
The turnout in both rounds remained low, at just over 30 percent of eligible voters, according to the preliminary figures. A referendum on a plan for the transition after the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak drew about 41 percent of eligible voters.
“The nature of political work does not suit my nature as a judge,” he said.
The opposition leaders argued that violations of voting procedures had compromised the results, and they demanded that the election authorities rule on those allegations before issuing official results, which are expected Monday.
The turnout for Saturday’s voting appeared to be low, as it was last week. At one polling place in the dense Mohandeseen district near Cairo, the station was empty at midday. The low turnout may have reflected a lack of enthusiasm or perhaps a consensus among Egyptians that after last week, the charter’s approval was a foregone conclusion.
But the ballots were cast into transparent boxes and counted on the spot under the supervision of independent monitors, reducing opportunities for fraud. The fact that the constitution was approved by 4.5 million votes — out of 16.2 million cast — suggested that rigging the results would have required systematic fraud.
Mr. Morsi’s advisers said that after the ballots were counted in the coming days he would deliver a televised address calling for unity and reconciliation. His critics said that to be credible he would need to strike a tone different from that of his previous address. In that speech, he blamed a conspiracy of foreign agents, Mubarak cronies and his political opponents for a deadly night of street fighting between his supporters and other protesters.
International experts said the constitution does not significantly alter the role of religion in Egyptian law. But it raises the stakes in future contests over who will interpret it. Although the new charter preserves an article from the old constitution declaring that the principles of Islamic law are a main source of legislation, it adds a new article, No. 219, which broadly defines those principles as the established schools of Sunni Muslim scholarship. Independent scholars have said that whether the new provisions make a difference will depend on who controls their application.
In what Mr. Morsi’s advisers called a significant step toward reducing tensions, the president was planning to appoint some of his opponents to the Islamist-dominated upper house of Parliament. Although largely powerless, it will act as the main legislature until the coming re-election of the lower house, which was dissolved by the courts.
Zaid al-Ali, a researcher at the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, an intergovernmental organization, said the constitution’s principal defects were not about religion. The biggest problem, he said, is that it protects the Egyptian military from legal and parliamentary oversight, engraving its autonomy in the constitution. Leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood had said privately for months that they were willing to provide the military such constitutional protections in order to ease the transition of power from the generals who assumed control from Mr. Mubarak.
Advisers to Mr. Morsi, who has the power to name 90 of the 270 seats, said he was expected to announce a roster of upper house appointees that would include eight representatives selected by the leaders of Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant churches. That was more than the number of representatives chosen by Egypt’s highest Muslim authority, Al Azhar. At least four other appointees are Christian as well, his advisers said.
A second problem, Mr. Ali said, is the failure to decentralize decision-making. While most of the world has shifted power closer to the local level, he said, the Arab states have resisted out of a fear that they might be divided up as they were under colonial rule. “Because of the centralization in the Arab region, as soon as you step out of the capital you are in different universe,” Mr. Ali said. “It is an ineffectual way to meet people’s needs, and services aren’t delivered.”
Most members of Egypt’s Christian minority, about 10 percent of the population, have opposed the draft constitution since the Coptic Church withdrew its representatives from the constitutional assembly in a dispute over the role of Islamic law in Egyptian jurisprudence.
Sectarian animosities continued to surround the vote. The Coptic Church pulled its representatives from the constitutional assembly in a dispute over the provisions about Islamic law in jurisprudence, and before the vote many Christians said it was axiomatic that everyone of their faith would vote against the charter.
The leaders of the main opposition coalition have refused to negotiate with Mr. Morsi or take seats in the upper house. His Islamist allies will still dominate, they say. Islamists won more than 70 percent of the seats in the parliamentary elections in late 2011. But their opponents see an opportunity to gain seats in the coming Parliament because of the backlash against Mr. Morsi’s heavy-handed attempts to force the draft constitution to a vote. Mr. Morsi pushed ahead over the objections of his opponents, judges and the Coptic Church.
Opposition leaders charged Sunday that Islamists had intimidated Christians or blocked their access to the polls in some precincts. But the accusations could not be confirmed.
Mr. Moussa and others have said they hope the coalition forged to fight the draft constitution can hold together as a bloc in the elections. But if the anti-Islamist bloc does hold together, some worry it will force the mainstream Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood into closer collaboration with the ultraconservative Salafis, reinforcing sectarianism and polarization.
Also on Sunday, a small group of President Morsi’s Islamist supporters continued a sit-in outside the constitutional court, still determined to discourage it from any ruling that might interfere with the referendum before the results are official.
Moataz Abdel-Fattah, a political scientist and former delegate in the constitutional assembly, said neither side appeared willing to respect the views of the other.
“We have an elite running its affairs according to a strategy of stubbornness,” he said. “Everybody is trying to understand what the other side wants so that they can ask for the exact opposite.”
