Andrew C. McCarthy
Amid the continuing unrest in Egypt, President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood has now decided to bifurcate
the referendum on the proposed sharia constitution. The voting will go
forward as scheduled this Saturday, but only in ten governorates. The
rest of the country will then vote the following Saturday, December 22.
The whole point of Morsi’s presidency, the point of everything he’s
done for the last five months, is the implementation of a sharia
constitution. As I explain in Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy (soon to be published in paperback),
that is what Morsi and the Brotherhood promised to do during the
campaign leading to his election as president. Sharia implementation is
the goal behind his seizures of dictatorial powers: In August, Morsi
awarded himself legislative authority in the wake of the then-ruling
junta’s dissolution of the elected, Islamist-dominated parliament in
order to ensure that the Islamist agenda proceeded. In late November, he
declared his “sovereign” acts immune from judicial review specifically
to protect the Islamist-dominated “constituent assembly” that was
writing the sharia constitution from being invalidated by the courts.
The ongoing, occasionally lethal controversy over the constitution
brings into sharp relief the fraud that is the “Arab Spring” narrative.
Morsi, an authoritarian, anti-democratic, sharia hardliner, is lauded as
Egypt’s “democratic” ruler because he won a popular election. He is
desperate to put his illiberal, liberty-strangling, anti-democratic
sharia constitution to a popular vote because he believes that he will
win. And with good reason: before Mubarak fell, polling showed that
upwards of two-thirds of Egyptians wanted to live under sharia rule; and
since Mubarak fell, Islamic supremacists have won popular elections by
comfortable margins.
By contrast, Morsi’s opposition — a mixed bag of secularists,
leftists, libertarians, authentically moderate Muslims, and religious
minorities — condemns the draft constitution as a betrayal of their
“democratic” revolution … but the last thing they want is for that
proposition to be tested at the ballot box. They rail against Morsi’s
power grabs, against the lack of “societal consensus” in the sharia
constitution, and against the purportedly invalid constitution-writing
“process” because they are desperate to prevent a referendum they are
almost certain to lose. Despite the Western media’s mirage of a
“democratic” upheaval led by youthful, secular Facebook revolutionaries
and such darlings of the Left as Mohammed ElBaradei, the non-Islamists
know they are the minority. They also know the West’s democracy fetish
is such that a constitution that wins a popular election will be hailed
as a triumph of democracy, no matter how much it undermines human
rights.
Morsi is bifurcating the referendum because it will help the sharia
constitution win. Under Egyptian law, the judiciary is supposed to
monitor elections. Because the judiciary is one of the remaining
institutions in which the secularists and the old regime enjoy at least a
toe-hold, many judges have threatened to boycott the referendum. By
staggering the election, fewer judges will be needed for monitoring on
each day of voting. In addition, in a bifurcated election, the strong
Brotherhood network — unmatched by anything the opposition can muster —
will concentrate its full get-out-the-vote effort in smaller areas on
each election day. When the parliamentary elections were similarly
staggered, the Islamists won by an overwhelming 4-to-1 margin.
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