By Henrik Ertner Rasmussen
28.06.2012 Egypt. Egypt got its first democratically elected leader after a close, almost dead heat between a representative of the old regime of ousted President Hosni Mubarak and Muslim Brotherhood candidate Muhammad Mursi. Thus, the fears of many Christians have been realized.
"Democratically elected" is putting it mildly. There are reports of widespread election irregularities, including many Christians being prevented from voting and people being pressured to vote for a particular candidate in many places - not to mention that in many places more votes were cast than were eligible. Many believe that the ruling military council was afraid of more violence and chaos if their preferred candidate was elected, which would have been a real possibility, and that the military council made sure to "fix" the election so that they got the lesser of two evils. At the same time, however, they cleverly stripped the presidency of a wide range of powers, which means that the president's power is more limited than voters expected when they cast their ballots and that the government gains more power, meaning that the military currently holds the decisive power. The ruling military council is to be replaced by a civilian government, but this is taking a long time, and the constitutional court has ruled the relatively newly elected parliament illegal and closed it because 1/3 of its members were elected on false pretenses. In other words, the new Egyptian democracy has undergone a protracted birth that has not yet been completed and where it almost looks as if the "baby" had to have both an arm and a leg amputated to be born!
On the positive side, however, after Mursi was declared the winner, both international and Egyptian news media report that he will do everything to unite the nation, and he has shown this by declaring that he will choose a woman and a Copt (Christian) as his two vice presidents. One well-known blogger wrote that if he appointed a woman as vice president in charge of the education sector, all Egyptians would kiss him on the cheek!
This, of course, leads many to adopt a wait-and-see attitude towards the newly elected president. In any case, he faces an almost inhumanly large task. He is expected to solve Egypt's many economic and social problems so that the ordinary citizen feels a change for the better, and that is almost impossible. Just putting three healthy meals on the table every day is a huge challenge for the majority of Egyptians. That every child born in Egypt can look forward to just 8-9 years of schooling seems almost impossible - unless there is massive foreign support to build the thousands of new schools that will need to be built to make it happen. Countries like Saudi Arabia are willing to support, but only if the schools will promote the particular brand of Islam that prevails there, and even many Muslim Egyptians will oppose that.
