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Ahead of presidential elections in Russia and Egypt this month — Russia’s on Sunday, Egypt’s in two weeks — it’s tough to choose which will be more of a farce.
There’s no doubt over either outcome: The incumbent leaders of both countries — President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi of Egypt — will win. They both rule as autocratic strongmen, styling themselves as fathers of the nation. Both have seized upon their races as platforms for their legitimacy but have ensured there’s no possible way they could lose. Their allies boast of their soaring popularity even as their critics remain largely muzzled, imprisoned, exiled or otherwise subdued.
Any genuine opponents who could challenge Sissi have been sidelined, detained or disqualified from running. Mousa Moustafa Mousa, the token rival candidate, was reportedly collecting signatures supporting Sissi’s reelection up until January. And the field squaring off against Putin includes loyalists, hard line nationalists and even a youthful reality-TV host who is rumored to be Putin’s own goddaughter.
“Four years ago Sissi allowed a genuine opponent, leftist Hamdeen Sabahi, to run against him. This year his four potentially serious challengers, including two former senior military officers, were jailed or threatened with prosecution to keep them off the ballot,” wrote Jackson Diehl, The Washington Post’s deputy editorial page editor. “Putin’s propagandists claim that he enjoys overwhelming support from Russians, yet the new czar also no longer allows himself to be tested by real competition. A decade ago, opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was permitted to run for president against Putin’s stand-in, Dmitry Medvedev. Now Nemtsov is dead — assassinated outside the Kremlin — while the country’s most popular dissident, Alexei Navalny, is banned from this year’s vote.”
But in both these nominal democracies, the show must go on. Both leaders see these votes as affirmations of their popularity and therefore hope for high turnouts in their favor. At an event in January, with opponents calling for boycotts, Sissi even cast those who refused to vote as potential threats to national security.
Putin speaks at a nationalist youth forum in Moscow on March 15. (Pool photo by Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik via EPA-EFE)
The situation is little different in Russia. “Putin needs a high turnout to justify his increasingly confrontational policy with the West and a military rearmament campaign that has sucked rubles out of social programs, political observers say,” Thomas Grove of the Wall Street Journal reported. “The problem is one of the Kremlin’s own making: Putin has squashed the opposition during his 18 years in power.”
So Putin has invested much effort in at least playing the part of a candidate, attending rallies across the country with the support of patriotic pop stars and flag-waving crowds. In some areas of Russia, voters are being enticed to come to the polls Sunday with promotions offering everything from free cancer screenings to contests to win new iPhones.
There’s a faint desperation underlying these efforts. “If [Putin] and his policies were truly popular, in the real sense of the word, he wouldn’t need to spend so much time and effort dominating the media, eliminating rivals, and rigging elections large and small,” wrote former chess grandmaster and vocal dissident Garry Kasparov. “Persecuting bloggers and arresting a single protester standing in the town square with an anti-Putin sign does not strike me as the behavior of a ruler who believes in his own popularity.”
Indeed, both Putin and Sissi seem bent on tightening their already white-knuckled grip on power. In a 2013 military coup, Sissi toppled his country’s only democratically elected president, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi. Sissi then won 97 percent of the vote in a 2014 election staged after the brutal suppression of the Brotherhood and other dissidents. Meanwhile, the 2012 election that returned Putin to the presidency was shrouded in allegations of voter fraud and irregularities, though the protests they sparked in Moscow did not stick.
In the long-run, Navalny does pose a real threat to Putin. He has galvanized thousands of supporters across Russia through an anti-corruption campaign, complicating Putin’s message of placid patriotic unity. “Despite the ban, Navalny emerges from this campaign as a winner,” wrote journalist Leonid Ragozin. “He has succeeded in seizing the initiative from the Kremlin and imposing his agenda on it.”
A campaign banner for Sissi reading “Long live Egypt, Abdel Fatah al-Sissi for President,” in Cairo on March 14. (Nariman El-Mofty/Associated Press)
Sissi, who has been in power for far less time than Putin, has much to fear if turnout is low. Like other countries in the Middle East, Egypt is struggling to reckon with stuttering economic growth and soaring youth unemployment. Some analysts warn of an inevitable social explosion.
“Empty polling places and low turnout during the 2014 elections alarmed the government enough to extend the voting hours and the polling period to a third day and to declare a holiday for public and private employees,” academic Gail Buttorff wrote for The Post’s Monkey Cage blog. “Without even a semblance of competition, the March polls can hardly be considered a legitimate referendum on Sissi’s popularity. Together with the possibility of low turnout, whether because of the boycott or anger over harsh economic conditions, the elections could prove to be a flash point.”
And so Sissi’s government has taken extraordinary measures to crack down on opposition voices in the run-up to the vote, taking prominent TV journalists off the air and working to stifle criticism on social media. This week, Egyptian authorities published a series of phone numbers to which citizens could report on media outlets believed to be circulating supposed fake news or harming the national interest.
“I don’t see a need for all these measures. We are looking at an election that’s already decided, and the only challenge facing the regime is the turnout,” Ahmed Abd Rabou, a political-science professor at Cairo University, told the Associated Press. “It’s hysterical. But it is a fact that we are heading toward more authoritarianism. Regrettably, that seems to be happening in many places.”
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