CAIRO – Egypt’s presidential election fell short of international standards of democracy, two teams of foreign observers said Thursday, a day after the former military officer who led last summer’s military takeover won a landslide victory with more than 95 percent of the vote.
“Egypt’s repressive political environment made a genuinely democratic presidential election impossible,” Eric Bjornlund, president of Democracy International, an election-monitoring organization funded by the United States, said in a statement. In an interview, he called the political context “hugely troubling.”
A team of European Union observers said in a statement that, despite guarantees in Egypt’s Constitution, respect for the essential freedoms of association and expression “falls short of these constitutional principles.” Robert Goebbels, a Luxembourg member of the European Parliament, summarized the voting process as “free but not always very fair,” noting the winner’s overwhelming advantage in both financial resources and media attention.
The winner, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, the former army field marshal, was universally perceived as the candidate of the state, the political establishment and the business elite, and his victory had been so widely expected that it was almost a formality.
Election officials said Thursday that el-Sissi’s only opponent, Hamdeen Sabahi, had won less than 3 percent of the vote. He finished basically tied with the number of ballots that had been defaced to protest what critics called the undemocratic climate and limited choices.
Supporters of el-Sissi counted on the election to legitimize his leadership after the military ouster last summer of President Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Officials said Thursday that about 47 percent of the roughly 54 million eligible voters had cast ballots, giving el-Sissi 23.9 million votes. Morsi had received about 13.2 million votes in 2012, in a close and competitive race against another former general, Ahmed Shafik.
The strong turnout followed days of public hand-wringing about the apparent emptiness of the polling stations. The absence of voters was so conspicuous on the first two scheduled days of balloting that election officials took the extraordinary step of adding a third day at the last minute, to strengthen the total turnout.
Both teams of foreign observers faulted the last-minute addition of a third day as a needless irregularity that raised doubts about the credibility of the process and the independence of the election authorities.
