The Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), which represents Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, has won 47 per cent of all seats in the country’s election for the lower house of parliament, the election commission has said.
The FJP won 235 seats in the new People’s Assembly, Abdel Moez Ibrahim, the head of the country’s election commission, announced on Saturday.
It also secured 127 seats on party lists, while its candidates won another 108 in first-past-the-post constituency votes, where votes were cast for individual candidates.
The hardline Islamist Salafi al-Nour party has won 24 per cent of all seats on offer.
The liberal al-Wafd party won about seven per cent of the seats, according to the latest results. The remaining 22 per cent of seats were split amongst smaller political parties.
The election commission says that voter turnout was 54 per cent in the polls.
The FJP has named Saad al-Katatni, a leading Muslim Brotherhood official who has previously sat in parliament as an independent, as speaker of the assembly.
Pity the Republicans didn’t lay this albatross around Obama’s neck back when this went down in the late winter and Spring.
Oh well, the two parties are really one.
CBS News in March, 2011, had this to say:
Some within the U.S. intelligence community, foreign diplomatic circles and the Republican Party say Obama’s readiness to accept Islamist movements, even ones that meet certain conditions, fails to take into consideration the methodical approach many such parties adopt toward gradually transforming secular nations into Islamic states at odds with U.S. policy goals.
Yeah, pity the Republicans sat back with their johnson in their hands when this all went down.
Unfortunately Islam in Egypt isn’t moderate (even by lenient standards). 80% of the electorate believes that the death penalty is an appropriate penalty for apostasy from Islam. In terms of Islamic conservatism Egypt is a lot closer to Yemen and Saudi Arabia than it is to a place like Turkey.
It’s going to be a big problem in the next twenty years or so. Egypt has declining oil exports, a growing population, and very limited agricultural capacity. And along with that it doesn’t look like it’s fixing to gear up any other sort of exports. Basket case in the works.
bbartlog, good point about the Egyptian basket case of an economy.
90% of their old economy had been tourism.
Now they want to attract Muslims to Egypt to replace those infidels who used to visit all the pre-Islamic sites.
LOL!
WHY???
Add to that, the Muslims who used to lead Egypt allowed a slave class of Coptic Christians to act as trash men for the nation.
But now the two Islamist parties have been working hard together to wipe out their Coptics, buring their churches, killing their men, kidnapping their girls & even their married women and basically causing an exodus of Copts out of Egypt.
But no one Muslim will do that work.
And there is no other system in place to pick up the Muslim’s trash.
OOPS!
DIRTY basket case!