Many years ago, Coptic Orthodox Bishop Musa established a nice initiative to invite prominent Muslim speakers to the Cathedral to speak about a subject of general interest that would encourage dialogue between Muslim and Christian participants.

On January 20, Former Member of Parliament, Dr. Amr el-Shobaki spoke in the Cathedral about the referendum. He explained to his audience that accepting the Constitution with 98.1% voting ‘yes’ and only 1.9% ‘no’ appears to be strange. Of course such an outcome reminded us of the days of past presidents in which they won elections with similar percentages. The reasons for this outcome lies in Muslim Brotherhood campaigning for a boycott of this referendum and other Egyptians seeing, for various reasons, no need to vote.

Dr. el-Shobaki finds this constitution far better than the previous one, but the campaigns for this constitution were, unfortunately, dubious.

Our researcher, Yosra El-Gendi, looked at the media campaign prior to this referendum. There was almost no space to campaign against the Constitution. The media campaigns on the Constitution lacked serious discussions on the strengths and weaknesses of the Constitution. El-Gendi questions the influence of religion on whether constituents oppose or support the current constitution. She concludes that the lack of diversity in opinions in the public sphere shows the extent to which the space for dialogue has been reduced in Egyptian society and replaced by fixed answers.

Liberal scholar, Dr. Mahmoud Khayyal, who attended the meeting with Dr. el-Shobaki, felt discouraged to vote in an election in which the outcome was already clear on the first day of voting. He believes many more people must have felt this way. 38% of the electorate voted. The non-voters (62%) are both people who felt no need to make an effort to vote and people who boycotted these elections (as called for by the Muslim Brotherhood).  Part of the non-voters are non-Islamists, like Khayyal, who voted in previous elections but this lacked the motivation to do so because the outcome seemed already so obvious.

This is unfortunate. The Constitution would have garnered much more authority if it were accepted in a truly free campaign in which proponents and opponents both would have had equal opportunities to express their views. For more information you can read Yosra El-Gendi’s report here.

Cornelis Hulsman

Editor-in-chief, Arab-West Report