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Violations detected at Egypt’s presidential run-offs

17 June 2012 04:49 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Polling stations closed Saturday across Egypt on the first day of the two-day presidential run-off, contested by an Islamist vowing to protect the revolution that ousted Hosny Mubarak and a former army general who says he would restore security, APA reports quoting fananews.com website.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi and Ahmed Shafiq, Mubarak’s last premier, are vying in Egypt’s first free presidential election.

Forty-eight cases of illegal canvassing were detected in several parts of Egypt on Saturday, said Farouk Sultan, the head of the election commission.

"These violations do not influence the validity of the election process as a whole," he added.

High temperatures earlier in the day had discouraged voters, according to monitors.

Voter turnout increased in several provinces in the cooler afternoon and the evening, reported state media, which said the process ran quietly.

Shafiq’s campaign estimated that at least 20 per cent of the eligible voters had turned up on Saturday. There were no official figures.

The election commission extended polling time by an extra hour until 9 pm (1900 GMT) on Saturday to accommodate voters.

The run-off round takes place two days after Egypt’s highest court dissolved the lower house of parliament, which is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists.

The military ruler Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi Saturday endorsed the ruling in a decree, which the Muslim Brotherhood called a "coup against democracy."

The dissolution of the legislature by judges appointed under Mubarak, coming on the heels of a government decision to grant the military police and intelligence powers to arrest civilians, have raised fears that officials from the old regime were plotting with the ruling military to return to power.

"If God permits, I will lead you to a new Egypt," said Morsi, who is running for the powerful Muslim Brotherhood, after he voted in his hometown of Zagazig in northern Egypt.

His challenger Shafiq has pledged to restore law and order and not to crack down on dissenters.

"We don’t want to return to oppression and injustice. Now we want someone who fears God. Islam is a democratic religion," said Tarek Kamal, a Morsi supporter in the working- class Cairo district of Nasseriya.

Secular and leftist Egyptians fear that if Morsi wins, he will seek to establish a religious state in Egypt where the rights of liberals and minorities will be undermined.

"We’re going into a new era of real democracy. Everyone can vote as they wish without influencing anyone else," Kamal’s friend Mohammed Ismail, who supports Shafiq, told dpa.

A man sitting outside a closed shop further up the street said he liked neither candidate and had no intention of voting.

"We know these elections are arranged especially for Shafiq. We didn’t have a revolution so that Mubarak could come back," the man said, declining to give his name.

A local monitoring group predicted that turnout would be higher than in the first round.

"The rise in voting in the run-off indicates that the overall turnout will be high compared to the first round," said Hafez Abu Saeda, general coordinator of the Egyptian Alliance for Election Monitoring.

Some 50 million Egyptians in the country of about 80 million people are eligible to vote in the election.

The protest April 6 movement said that 25 of its members were arrested on Saturday outside polling stations for holding up photos of demonstrators who were killed in the revolt against Mubarak.

The arrested activists were accused of inciting voters to boycott the election, said the group. They were released later, according to the state-run newspaper Al Ahram online.

Polls are to reopen at 8 am (0800 GMT) on Sunday for the second and final day of voting. Official results are due to be announced on June 21.