22 October 2015•Update: 22 October 2015
CAIRO
Voter turnout in the first round of Egypt’s parliamentary elections was 26.56 percent, the country’s electoral commission said, confirming expected low participation levels in the two-day ballot.
Addressing a press conference in Cairo on Wednesday, commission chief Ayman Abbas said 7,270,594 voters cast their ballot in the first round of the polls held Sunday and Monday.
Some 27,402,353 voters were eligible to cast their ballot in the first round of the polls, which were held in half of Egypt’s 27 provinces.
“Voter turnout in the two-day vote reached 26.56 percent,” Abbas said.
Out of 2,548 candidates vying for 226 individual seats in the first round, only four candidates were declared final winners, according to the commission chief.
A run-off of the vote is scheduled to take place next week.
On Tuesday, the electoral commission said 30,531 expatriates voted in the first round of the polls, accounting for less than five percent of eligible voters in this round.
The low turnout announced by the electoral commission confirmed expectations that Egyptian voters were apathetic to the parliamentary polls, the first since the 2013 military coup against President Mohamed Morsi.
Abbas said that the For the Love of Egypt bloc -- a pro-military list led by a former intelligence chief -- won 60 seats allocated for party lists in the first round of the polls.
Political opponents argue that the low turnout is a “message of change” for the military-backed Egyptian regime.
“By banning key opposition parties and jailing tens of thousands of Egyptians for expressing dissenting views, [President Abdel-Fattah] Sisi has taken Egypt farther from the values of tolerance and pluralism that are required of democratic societies,” Dokhi Fassihian, from Freedom House, a U.S. government-funded NGO, said.
Since Morsi’s overthrow, Egyptian authorities have maintained a harsh crackdown on dissent, killing hundreds of supporters of the ousted president and his Muslim Brotherhood group and detaining thousands of political activists.
Egypt has not had a parliament since the dissolution of the assembly in 2012. In the absence of a functioning parliament, Sisi currently holds legislative authority.
