The Plan

I have been kind of stoic lately concerning the political situation in Egypt, especially after the fiasco that was the result of the presidential election. The way things went down, made me sort of lose interest in what’s happening on the political scene, for it all seemed to be kind of contrived and stupid. However, when you are as interested in politics as I am, when you say that you sort of lost interest, well, that’s a nice way to say that “You still follow it, but just don’t obsess about it as much”. I have been politically stoic since the election, sort of observing while detached from the whole thing. And that, interestingly, led me to gain a completely new perspective on the whole situation and it gave me a few ideas. Looking at the election now and it’s really low turn out, I am not sure that a lot of vote rigging happened. It really wasn’t necessary, because no one went and voted. The 6 million people who voted Mubarak are the police and the government workers and Union members who were bused and forced to vote for him. We also can not discount the effect of the NDP media onslaught on the psyche of the average Egyptian voter. Had more people been allowed to vote, using their ID instead of the Voter registration card, I highly doubt that Mubarak would’ve lost at all. He wouldn’t have 88%, but he still would’ve won. He had too much money, too powerful of a media machine and a really organized campaign. None of the others had anything even close. Ayman Nour was able get International Media attention thanks to the work of his wife, old Newsweek correspondent, Gamilla Ismail. She knew how to present him to the international media, while the other candidates didn’t even think that was important at all. So the question becomes: Well, how do we remedy the situation? How do we balance the scales? And the answer you won’t like is: You can’t! They have way too much power and money for this to ever be a fair fight. Everybody knows that. But that doesn’t mean it’s a hopeless case. The opposition parties will have to fight, well, just a little bit dirty, and I have been helping them do just that! I will tell you all how on the sequel to this post, which I will publish tomorrow, because now I have to go. I am sorry, but this is all for today folks. Have a good one!