The president of Egypt can now legally stay in power for 11 more years. But rest assured, he will not be in office forever, because “there’s no such thing as ruling for eternity.” According to President Abdel Fattah ElSisi. “We all die at some point.”
On the 23rd of April 2019, Egypt passed the most dangerous constitutional referendum in its history with an alleged 88.8% of voters saying YES to the proposed changes. Admittedly, it’s a slightly more creative percentage than the presidential elections of last year, which ElSisi won by 97%, after jailing all but one of his opponents.
Faced with a sham referendum that, among other changes, extends the presidential term until 2030, some Egyptian government-opposers decided to go vote No, despite the predictable result. By doing so, they hold on to a fleeting sense of hope and raise a voice of dissent against the regime, albeit a muffled one.
No one, of course, was surprised by the April results. In fact, we Egyptians have grown accustomed to these types of elections, complete with DJs and government-commissioned music videos accompanied by dancing supporters in matching T-shirts. Not to mention subsidy boxes exploiting the poor and buying their vote in exchange for two packets of flour and a month’s supply of cooking oil. In the past, people in the opposition have called for a boycott of elections in an effort to expose the illegitimacy of the vote and to refuse to participate in what many want the world to know is simply a travesty of democracy, staged by a dictatorial military regime.
What was interesting this time around is the online movement by regime-opposers to actively participate in the referendum and vote No, rather than the usual boycott. For days – and it was only days between the announcement of the amendments and the start of voting – my social media feeds were filled by friends in the opposition debating about the vote, asking themselves and each other the common question: “What’s the point?”. The tired and the cynical made fun of those supporting the movement to vote No and popularizing the hashtag #انزل_قول_لأ (Go say no); The latter responded with impassioned posts about our country’s future and our people’s lost revolution.
When the revolution erupted in January of 2011, I was only 14 years old. Politics were not really a topic of discussion in our house, but I knew my parents didn’t like then-president Mubarak. As an Egyptian, self-censorship is a skill passed down to you at an early age out of fear of the reach of the police state. In fact, I remember one of my first lessons. One day in primary school I was singing a jingle from a famous advertisement while walking home with my father. The song was for the popular cheese product La Vache qui rit, The Laughing Cow. And to my father’s surprise, I turned to him and asked loudly “Why do we call Mubarak the laughing cow!?” … Unknowingly, I was referring to a derogatory caricaturization of Mubarak, a tacit form of humorist resistance, commonly used as a tool of popular dissent. At the time, I was not old enough to be let in on the joke, but this was the day my father explained to me what a plain-clothed informant is and why we don’t talk about politics in public. Or at all.
My parents’ generation is one that experienced an era of disillusionment and political disengagement, brought about by the military’s dominance of the political process since 1952. A period that gave rise to what is now known as the “Couch Party”, a term coined during the revolution to refer to the silent majority of politically detached Egyptians, whose participation in public life does not extend beyond the couches of their homes. Many in the Vote No campaign this year warned that boycotting the referendum would be a return to the same political stalemate; A return to the proverbial couch.
The 2011 revolution broke through a barrier of fear and political paralysis. When millions of Egyptians took to the streets and ousted Mubarak, not only did politics become a topic of discussion in every household, but the people actually saw themselves as participants in the political process, agents for change after years of oppression, suffering and inequality.
That sense of agency was short-lived. When people mobilized again in 2013 to protest the Muslim Brotherhood’s push for more power, their movement was hijacked by a military coup, masked as a response to popular demand. Today, many call the the series of 2011 uprisings, dubbed the Arab Spring, failed revolutions. Apart from Tunisia, all the countries that saw massive protests in 2011, today are far from meeting any of the revolutionaries’ demands, the removal of the president simply being the tip of the iceberg in most of these cases. Just to name a few, Yemen is entangled in an ugly proxy war, Libya has become a failed state, Syria is committing war crimes against its own people in its torture facilities, and Egypt has made a full circle back to brutal military dictatorship.
ElSisi’s is the most oppressive and relentless regime Egypt has ever seen. Since his rise to power in 2014, we have witnessed countless executions without due process, waves of forced disappearances, detention of young people and activists, and torture, which as in the case of Giulio Regeni, an Italian graduate student researching labor rights, can end in murder. Most recently, we were traumatized by the images of people burning to death after a railway accident in Cairo’s main station which exposed the level of neglect to which the regime has allowed the basic infrastructure to descend. Repairs to the railway were proposed last year, but in a televised conference the president brushed off the proposals claiming they were not worth the investment.
Indeed, in ElSisi’s Egypt, human lives are not worth the investment and human rights have no place. Neither does the rule of law. The constitutional amendments extend presidential term duration to six years and allow for two consecutive terms. The changes will be applied retroactively to the president’s current term, extending it until 2024, but they also disregard the president’s first term that ended in 2018, making it possible for him to stay in power until 2030… or until the next referendum. The amendments also extend presidential powers over the judiciary and make the military in charge of “protecting democracy”. The final text was never made available to voters and was not posted at voting stations.
In the few days between the announcements of the referendum and the window to vote while abroad, I tried to arrange a trip to NYC in order to vote, but it was impossible at such short notice. I had spent the entire week arguing online as I made up my decision about whether to Vote No or to Boycott and had eventually decided I wanted to join the efforts to Vote No simply in order to fight passivity.
The entire operation was illegitimate and undemocratic and the turnout figures were clearly inflated, claiming 44% participation rate (~27 million people), despite empty polling stations. Those pushing for a No vote were fully aware of that. In fact, this movement actually has nothing to do with the results, but only with the act of participation. It is a movement against passivity, against defeatism and against the reemergence of the politically unengaged Couch Party. It is a movement of hope to remind the people, but also to remind those in power that once the barrier of fear is broken, nothing can reimpose it. Despite the brutality of the current regime, the movement to Vote No in this referendum served as an attempt to hold on to this glimmer of hope, to the promise of the revolution and to the memory of those who died fighting for it and those who are still in prison for believing in it.