CAIRO: More than 500 of Egypt’s 596 lawmakers have signed “recommendations” supporting a re-election bid by President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, even before he has formally announced his candidacy, according to news reports published on Thursday.
El-Sisi is considered virtually certain to run in the March 26-28 election and to win a second four-year term. So far, no candidate who can pose a serious challenge to the general-turned-president has emerged.
One prominent potential candidate announced last week he wouldn’t enter the race; two others have faced prosecution in the courts. Most opposition figures are either in jail, living abroad or staying on the sidelines after a general crackdown on dissent since el-Sisi led the military’s 2013 ouster of an Islamist president.
Under the constitution, to qualify to run, any would-be candidate must gather formal recommendations from at least 20 elected members of parliament, or alternatively 25,000 recommendations from voters, with a minimum of 1,000 each in 15 of Egypt’s 29 provinces. Rather than waiting for el-Sisi to seek recommendations, the lawmakers rushed to offer them first.
“Parliament achieves a record number in supporting El-Sisi,” ran the top headline in the Al-Masry Al-Youm newspaper. A photo showed smiling lawmakers standing in a half circle with copies of their recommendations in hand. The Egyptian parliament is packed with El-Sisi supporters and has since its election acted more like a rubber-stamp chamber.
Hundreds of advertisements have been put up across Cairo imploring El-Sisi to run. “So you can build it,” is the catch phrase of one such campaigns, alluding to the president’s focus on overhauling Egypt’s infrastructure and his ambitious program to overhaul the battered economy and build mega projects.
El-Sisi has said he will announce his candidacy after receiving feedback on his track record since taking office. He did not elaborate, but his office this week invited Egyptians to submit questions online for him to answer on live television. That would be the third time that El-Sisi appears in person on “Ask The President,” a televised Q&A session where he fields questions selected from among thousands of submissions.
Since 2013, El-Sisi has led a heavy crackdown that has jailed thousands of opponents, mainly Islamists but also a number of prominent secular activists, including many of those behind the 2011 uprising that toppled longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak. Street protests are banned; human rights groups have been placed under draconian restrictions, and several rights campaigners have been banned from foreign travel or had their assets frozen. Many critics in the media have been silenced.
The absence so far of strong candidates to run against him makes turnout key for the credibility of El-Sisi’s re-election. Critics have said the vote appears headed to something more akin to the one-candidate referendums that, for most of the past decades, confirmed the president, often by gigantic margins as high as 99 percent.
“We are back to the presidential elections that the president contests without having to campaign, announce an election program or address electoral rallies or even declare his intention to run and then win with a landslide,” commentator Ashraf El-Barbary wrote on the website of the Al-Shorouk newspaper.
Sarcastically, he added: “Egypt today is experiencing an ideal election climate that is the envy of the world because we have an election that has a respectable commission and potential candidates, but it has no competition, no programs and may also end up without voters.”
Already, Ahmed Shafiq, a former prime minister and ex-air force general who finished a close second behind the Islamist Muhammad Mursi in the 2012 election, decided not to run against El-Sisi. Another hopeful, Army Col. Ahmed Konsowa, was court martialed and sentenced to six years in prison for breaching military regulations prohibiting political activism.
Another hopeful, prominent rights campaigner Khaled Ali, would not be eligible to run if he loses his appeal against a conviction last September on charges of making an obscene gesture in public. Mohammed Anwar Sadat, an opposition politician who was thrown out of parliament last year, says he intends to run but complains of harassment by security agencies.
Analyst Ahmed Abd Rabou, also a political science lecturer, predicts that candidates will likely be placed under a “multitude of restrictions” or may not be allowed to contest the vote at all, leaving the president either running solo or against a “puppet” candidate.
Majority of Egypt’s lawmakers want president to run again
Majority of Egypt’s lawmakers want president to run again
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Israel says it has launched ‘broad wave’ of strikes on Iran, as Tehran widens its response across the region
- US military says 17 Iranian navy ships destroyed, struck nearly 2,000 targets in Iran thus far
- US and Israeli attacks have killed 787 people in Iran: Iranian Red Crescent
JERUSALEM/DUBAI/TEHRAN: Israel early Wednesday launched new attacks on Iran as the US military said it has hit nearly 2,000 targets inside the Islamic republic, which tried to impose a cost by expanding a missile and drone barrage across the region.
With global energy prices on the rise, President Donald Trump said the US Navy was ready to escort oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, the vital chokepoint into the Gulf that Iran has threatened to seal off.
Israel’s military said it launched a “broad wave of strikes” after midnight across Iran, which in the hours before had launched three separate missile barrages at Israel, causing mild injuries to a woman in Tel Aviv.
The US military has destroyed 17 Iranian ships, including a submarine, and struck nearly 2,000 targets in Iran, the commander of the US Central Command said on Tuesday.
“Today, there is not a single Iranian ship underway in the Arabian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, or Gulf of Oman,” US Central Command’s Brad Cooper said in a video posted to X.
Cooper said the US military has “severely degraded Iran’s air defenses” and taken out hundreds of ballistic missiles, launchers and drones.
The video showed missiles and jets launching from US ships, and targets exploding on the ground.
Cooper noted that Iran has launched over 500 ballistic missiles and more than 2,000 drones in retaliation.
But he said the US is “hunting” Iran’s last remaining mobile ballistic missile launchers to eliminate their “lingering launch capability.”
Cooper said the operation has involved more than 50,000 troops, 200 fighter jets, two aircraft carriers and bombers, and “more capability is on the way.”
“We’ve just begun,” Cooper said, adding that the US military is targeting “all the things that can shoot at us.”
“These forces bring a massive amount of firepower, representing the largest buildup by the US in the Middle East in a generation,” he said in the video message, describing the first day’s barrage as bigger than the so-called “shock and awe” against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003.
Iran‘s response
The US and Israeli attacks have killed 787 people in Iran, according to the Iranian Red Crescent, a toll that could not be independently confirmed.
Iran vowed to inflict a heavy price in retaliation. Drones struck adjacent the US consulate in Dubai, starting a fire but inflicting no casualties, and against the US military base at Al-Udeid in Qatar.
The attacks came a day after strikes on the US embassies in Riyadh and Kuwait City and on a US air base in Bahrain.
“We are saying to the enemy that if it decides to hit our main centers, we will hit all economic centers in the region,” Islamic Revolutionary Guard General Ebrahim Jabbari said.
Iranian attacks have killed at least nine people and wounded dozens in the Gulf region, according to various reports quoting local authorities.
Among the latest death was an 11-year-old girl who was killed after shrapnel fell in a residential area in Kuwait City, health authorities said Wednesday.
The Kuwait army said in a statement the shrapnel fell over a house and left casualties while forces were intercepting “several hostile aerial targets” over the country.
The Health Ministry said in a separate statement that the child died of her wounds at the hospital.
The child’s mother and three other relatives were injured and being treated at the hospital, it said.
Vessel hit in Gulf of Oman
A vessel was hit by a projectile early Wednesday in the Gulf of Oman off the United Arab Emirates, an agency of the UK military said.
There were no reported casualties.
The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations Center said the vessel was struck 8 miles east of Fujairah, one of the UAE’s seven emirates.
The attack damaged the vessel’s steel plating.
No fire or water intake was reported, it said.
Iran hits US embassies
The US State Department said Tuesday it’s preparing military and charter flights for Americans who want to leave the Middle East. Several other countries also arranged evacuation flights for their citizens.
An attack from two drones on the US Embassy in Riyadh caused a “limited fire,” according to the Saudi Arabian Defense Ministry, and the embassy urged Americans to avoid the compound.
An Iranian drone struck a parking lot outside the US consulate in Dubai, sparking a small fire, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in Washington. He said all personnel were accounted for.
The United Arab Emirates said it has intercepted the vast majority of more than 1,000 Iranian missile and drone attacks against it.
US embassies in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Lebanon said they were closed to the public.
The US State Department ordered the evacuation of non-emergency personnel and family in Kuwait, Bahrain, Iraq, Qatar, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. And US citizens were urged to leave more than a dozen Middle Eastern countries, though many were stranded because of airspace closures.
The US military has confirmed six deaths of American service members.
Four of the American soldiers killed were identified as Capt. Cody A. Khork, 35, of Winter Haven, Florida; Sgt. 1st Class Noah L. Tietjens, 42, of Bellevue, Nebraska; Sgt. 1st Class Nicole M. Amor, 39, of White Bear Lake, Minnesota; and Sgt, Declan J. Coady, 20, of West Des Moines, lowa, who received a posthumous promotion in rank. They were assigned to the Iowa-based 103rd Sustainment Command.
Ghost town
In Tehran, residents who have not fled remained shut away in their homes for fear of the US-Israeli bombardment.
The Iranian capital is normally home to around 10 million people, but in recent days “there are so few people that you’d think no one ever lived here,” said Samireh, a 33-year-old nurse.
Authorities had previously urged people to leave the city, and police officers, armed security forces and armored vehicles have been stationed at main junctions, carrying out random checks on vehicles.
In the more upmarket north of Tehran, the meowing of cats and chirping of birds replaced the usual din of traffic jams.
Iranian authorities said a strike on a school in the city of Minab on the first day of the war killed more than 150 people.
