Muslim Brotherhood: Won’t impose Islamic values

Islamist parties have won 65 percent of votes Islamist parties have won 65 percent of votes for party list seats in the first round of parliamentary elections, according to official figures obtained by AFP on Sunday. The moderate Muslim Brotherhood won 36.62 percent of the vote, followed by the hardline Salafist Al-Nur party with 24.36 and the moderate Al-Wasat with 4.27, according a chart provided by elections committee secretary general Yusri Abdel Karim.
Results continued to trickle in for Egypt's first post-revolution election as early returns showed Islamist parties sweeping to victory, including hardline Salafists, with secular parties trounced in many areas.
Partial figures for the areas of the country that voted in record numbers on Monday and Tuesday, confirming earlier predictions that Islamist parties would win at least two-thirds of ballots cast.
Prime Minister-designate Kamal el-Ganzouri meanwhile voiced hope that his new government would be sworn in by Wednesday, the official news agency MENA reported.
Ganzouri, 78, expected to end his consultations on the government line-up on Sunday. He said he decided to delay the announcement of the line-up, expected last Wednesday or Thursday, due to nomination changes, MENA added.
In northern Port Said, the moderate Islamist alliance led by the previously banned Muslim Brotherhood triumphed with 32.5 percent of votes for parties, while the hardline Al-Nur party gained 20.7 percent, Al-Ahram newspaper said.
The liberal Wafd party won 14 percent, while another Islamist party, Al-Wasat recorded 12.9 percent, according to the state-run daily.
In the southern Red Sea district, the Brotherhood's alliance won 30 percent, while secular coalition the Egyptian Bloc came in second with 15 percent, it said.
"The people have chosen candidates who represent their Islamic identity and who they have confidence in," said Mahmud Ghozlan, a spokesman for the Brotherhood, which expects to win 40 percent of the vote overall.
He stressed that the group's new Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) was distinct from the Salafists, who he said had won a surprising success in the polls.
"We hope that people make a difference between different movements and don't put all Islamists in the same basket," he added.
Full results after the first round -- which saw 62 percent turnout -- were initially meant to have been published on Wednesday but have been held back by the electoral commission.
There appeared few bright spots for the liberal secular movement which played a key role in the overthrow of the 30-year rule of president Hosni Mubarak in February after an 18-day uprising.
It has splintered and been overshadowed by the more organised Brotherhood, which is well known to Egyptians because of its decades of opposition to the Mubarak regime and its extensive charitable and social work.
Mohammed Abdel Ghani, a liberal candidate, told the independent Al-Shorouq newspaper that his movement needed to counter propaganda that "non-Islamist candidates were infidels."
In Cairo, the rising star of the movement, Amr Hemzawi, won a seat in the upmarket Heliopolis district, but elsewhere leading figures of the revolution were either struggling or had been beaten.
In Tahrir Square, the epicentre of protests against Mubarak, demonstrators returned last week to protest against the military rulers who took over when the strongman quit, but their numbers dwindled to a few hundred on Saturday.
"Everyone that we had faith in has betrayed us," 25-year-old protester Mohammed El-Assas told AFP.
According to independent daily Al-Masry Al-Youm, no women were elected in the first round.
One of them, Nihal Aahdi, told the paper it was because "religious parties dominate Egyptian society and the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists dominated the results."
It was only the opening phase of a parliamentary election that is taking place in three stages, but the returns reveal the political trends that will shape the country's transition to democracy.
For the lower house of parliament, the rest of the country will vote in a further two stages later this month and in January. An upper house will then be elected in another three stages.
Voters are required to pass three votes for the new lower house: two for individual candidates and one for a party or coalition.
All but four of the individual contests in this week's election will go into a run-off scheduled for Monday because no candidate gained an outright majority.
The prospect of an Islamist-dominated parliament raises fears among liberals about civil liberties, religious freedom in a country with the Middle East's largest Christian minority, and tolerance of multi-party democracy.
The Brotherhood and other political parties are expected to face a fierce power struggle for control with the army which took over when Mubarak stepped down.
Their rise is also expected to raise fears in Israel, which shares a border with Egypt and a peace agreement signed in 1979.
Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak on Saturday expressed deep concern over the trend from the first round of voting.
"The process of Islamisation in Arab countries is very worrying," Barak said on Israeli television. adding however that it was "premature to say how these changes will affect the region."
In contrast, the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, which enjoyed a landslide win in 2006 parliamentary elections, said the success of Islamist parties in Egypt was a "a very good result."
"It will mean more and more support for Palestinian issues," Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhum told AFP.
Egypt”s Muslim Brotherhood, emerging as the biggest winner in the first round of parliamentary elections, sought Saturday to reassure Egyptians that it would not sacrifice personal freedoms in promoting Islamic law.
The deputy head of the Brotherhood's new political party, Essam al-Erian, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview that the group is not interested in imposing Islamic values on Egypt, home to a sizable Christian minority and others who object to being subject to strict Islamic codes.
“We represent a moderate and fair party,” al-Erian said of his Freedom and Justice Party. “We want to apply the basics of Shariah law in a fair way that respects human rights and personal rights,” he said, referring to Islamic law.
The comments were the clearest indication that the Brotherhood was distancing itself from the ultraconservative Islamist Nour Party, which appears to have won the second-largest share of votes in the election’s first phase.
The Nour Party espouses a strict interpretation of Islam similar to that of Saudi Arabia, where the sexes are segregated and women must be veiled and are barred from driving.
Egypt’s election commission has released few official results from the voting on Monday and Tuesday. But preliminary counts have been leaked by judges and individual political groups showing both parties could together control a majority of seats in the lower house of parliament if they did form an alliance.
The Brotherhood recently denied in a statement that it seeks to form an alliance with the Nour Party in parliament, calling it “premature and mere media speculation.”
On Saturday, Erian made it clear that the Brotherhood does not share Nour’s more hard-line aspirations to strictly enforce Islamic codes in Egyptians’ daily lives.
“We respect all people in their choice of religion and life,” he said.
Another major check on such an agenda is the council of generals who have run the country since President Hosni Mubarak’s ouster in February. The military council, accused by Egypt’s protest movement of stalling a transition to civilian and democratic rule, is seeking to limit the powers of the next parliament and maintain close oversight over the drafting of a new constitution.
Egypt already uses Shariah law as the basis for legislation, however Egyptian laws remain largely secular as Shariah does not cover all aspects of modern life.
On its English-language Twitter account, the Brotherhood said that its priorities were to fix Egypt’s economy and improve the lives of ordinary Egyptians, “not to change (the) face of Egypt into (an) Islamic state.”
Erian urged the Brotherhood’s political rivals to accept the election results.
“We all believe that our success as Egyptians toward democracy is a real success and we want everyone to accept this democratic system. This is the guarantee for stability,” he said.
For decades, Mubarak’s regime suppressed the Brotherhood, which was politically banned but managed to establish a vast network of activists and charities offering free food and medical services throughout the country's impoverished neighborhoods and villages.
It is the best organized of Egypt’s post-Mubarak political forces.