Egypt Constitution Passes, Economic Crunch Looms

In a clear sign of anxiety over the economy, the turbulence of the past month and expected austerity measures ahead have some Egyptians hoarding dollars for fear the currency is about to take a significant turn for the weaker.

The battle over the constitution left Egypt deeply polarized at a time when the government is increasingly cash-strapped. Supporters of the charter campaigned for it on the grounds that it will lead to stability, improve the grip of Morsi and his allies on state institutions, restore investor confidence and bring back tourists.

"In times of change, politics are the driver of the economy and not the other way around," said Mourad Aly, a media adviser for the political arm of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, the backbone of Morsi's presidency and the main group that backed the constitution.

But there are already multiple fights on the horizon.

The U.S. State Department bluntly told Morsi it was now time to make compromises, acknowledging deep concerns over the constitution.

"President Morsi, as the democratically elected leader of Egypt, has a special responsibility to move forward in a way that recognizes the urgent need to bridge divisions, build trust, and broaden support for the political process," said Patrick Ventrell, acting deputy spokesman. "We hope those Egyptians disappointed by the result will seek more and deeper engagement. "

He said Egypt "needs a strong, inclusive government to meet its many challenges."

After a spate of resignations of senior aides and advisers during the constitutional crisis, Morsi appeared to have lost another member of his government late Tuesday night when his communications minister posted on his Twitter account that he was resigning.

The minister Hany Mahmoud said he "couldn't cope with the culture of government work, particular in the current conditions of the country." The resignation could not be immediately verified because it came so late at night.

Morsi signed a decree Tuesday night that put the new constitution into effect after the election commission announced the official results of the referendum held over the past two weekends. It said the constitution has passed with a 63.8 percent "yes." Turnout of 32.9 percent of Egypt's nearly 52 million registered voters was lower than most other elections since the uprising nearly two years ago that ousted authoritarian leader Hosni Mubarak

Morsi is expected to call for a new election of parliament's lawmaking lower house within two months.

In the meantime, the traditionally toothless upper house, the Shura Council, will hold legislative power. But the chamber is overwhelmingly Islamist-dominated so any laws it passes could spark a backlash from the opposition. Many fear a legal crackdown on independent media, highly critical of Islamists.

In a bid to reach out to opposition, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood said he hoped the charter will be a "good omen" for Egyptians.

"Let's all begin to build the renaissance of our country with free will, good intentions and strong determination, men, women, Muslims and Christians," Mohammed Badie said on his Twitter account.

But the opposition said the passing of the document is was not the end of the political dispute. Critics fear the constitution will usher in Islamic law in Egypt and restrict personal freedoms.

"This is not a constitution that will last for a long time," said Khaled Dawoud, a spokesman for the main opposition group, the National Salvation Front, vowing to fight for more freedoms, social and economic rights.

View the original article here

As Egypt Constitution Passes, New Fights Lie Ahead

“The People Sided With Democracy,” the flagship state newspaper, Al Ahram, declared in a headline.

“Wholesale Violations,” the largest independent daily, Al Masry Al Youm, said.

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 suspend temporarily the authority of the Egyptian courts in order to prevent rulings that he feared might block the referendum.

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.

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.”

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.

“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.

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.”

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

View the original article here

Morsi Admits Mistakes in Drafting Egypt’s Constitution

Appealing for unity after the bitter debate over the charter, which was finalized by his Islamist allies over the objections of opposition parties and the Coptic Christian Church, Mr. Morsi pledged in a televised address to respect the one-third of voters who cast ballots against it. “This is their right, because Egypt of the revolution — Egypt’s people and its elected president — can never feel annoyed by the active patriotic opposition,” he said, bobbing his head between the camera and the lectern as he read from a prepared text. “We don’t want to go back to the era of the one opinion and fabricated fake majorities.”

But Mr. Morsi offered no concrete concessions, and he did not acknowledge any specific errors, saying only, “There have been mistakes here and there, and I bear responsibility.” His most tangible outreach to the opposition was an invitation to join a so-called national dialogue that has already begun under his auspices. Hussein Abdel Ghani, a spokesman for the main opposition bloc, dismissed it as “a dialogue with himself” based on “political bribes.”

Still, Mr. Morsi’s attempt at reconciliation, however vague or superficial, represented another notable step in Egypt’s political transition. Here was a recently elected politician seeking to move from the brutally partisan campaign back to the political middle. The speech echoed many American inaugural addresses.

It was a stark contrast to Mr. Morsi’s previous speech, given just 20 days ago, when he sounded far more like his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak. Then, Mr. Morsi attributed a night of deadly violence between his Islamist supporters and their opponents to a conspiracy of foreign agents, old-regime insiders and his political rivals.

“As we all welcome difference in opinion, we all reject violence and breaking the law,” Mr. Morsi said Wednesday, without blaming either side this time.

In Egypt, where previous presidents more often jailed political opponents, even Mr. Morsi’s limited mea culpa appeared to be the first of its kind in decades. The last presidential apology was President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s speech offering his short-lived resignation after the humiliation of losing the 1967 war with Israel, said Khaled Fahmy, a liberal historian at the American University in Cairo. “It is the only thing comparable in its clarity,” Mr. Fahmy said. (Nasser’s theatrical resignation was rejected in a staged plebiscite.)

But at a news conference on Wednesday that was billed as a response to Mr. Morsi, the opposition leaders said they had not even listened to the speech. Mr. Abdel Ghani said the opposition coalition leaders had been in a meeting to draft a statement calling for new protests against the Constitution on the anniversary of the uprising that overthrew Mr. Mubarak on Jan. 25.

In its statement, the coalition complained of “scandalous violations that amounted to fraud” in the referendum that approved the Constitution.

“Even if this Constitution is considered approved legally,” the coalition said, “it lacks moral legitimacy, political legitimacy and popular legitimacy because it lacks national consensus.”

But with the results confirmed, the new order began to take shape. The Islamist-dominated upper house of Parliament met on Wednesday for the first time under provisions of the Constitution that empower it to act as the legislature until the election of a new lower house. The upper house had been almost powerless under the former Constitution, but a court order disbanded the more authoritative lower house last spring while Egypt was still under military rule.

The upper house’s first move was to relocate to the lower house chambers until the new elections, which are expected to be held in two months.

The Supreme Constitutional Court accepted its reconstitution under the new charter, which removed several of the most recently appointed judges. The reduction in its size effectively purged certain judges, including some who were Mubarak loyalists appointed in recent years and one who was an outspoken opponent who was often cast in the role of a villain by the Islamists.

The court’s response to the Constitution had been a matter of some suspense. Mr. Morsi and his Islamist allies had feared that the court would strike down the assembly that was created to draw up the charter, just as it had dissolved the lower house of Parliament, or would seek to review the Constitution. In a pre-emptive strike, Mr. Morsi sought last month to temporarily elevate his own powers over the court, setting off a month of sometimes violent battles between the Islamists and their opponents.

Since then, Mr. Morsi has come under growing international pressure to compromise and resolve the tensions.

After taking a notably evenhanded tone toward Mr. Morsi and his opponents through the stormy days after his power grab, the United States State Department said this week that the onus was on Mr. Morsi to pull Egypt back together. “Democracy requires much more than simple majority rule,” said a department spokesman, Patrick Ventrell. “It requires protecting the rights and building the institutions that make democracy meaningful and durable.

“President Morsi, as the democratically elected leader of Egypt, has a special responsibility to move forward in a way that recognizes the urgent need to bridge divisions, build trust and broaden support for the political process,” he added.

Mr. Morsi declared in his speech on Wednesday that Egypt was “moving steadfastly toward democracy and pluralism.” Under the new Constitution, he said, “everyone is equal without any discrimination.”

“No matter what were the hardships of the past period, I see it as the pain of birthing the new Egypt,” Mr. Morsi said. “It is truly the dawn of the new Egypt, which has risen and is now shining.”

Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting.

View the original article here