About 28 per cent of Egyptian voters cast ballots in a staggered parliamentary election dominated by pro-government candidates, the country’s election committee announced on Friday, following a crackdown on the main Islamist opposition group. Experts think that the real turnout might have been around 7 percent. Especially the young generation boycotted the elections.
Judge Ayman Abbas, the head of the committee, said that roughly 15 million out of a total of some 53 million people had cast ballots in a vote that lasted more than six weeks.
This election, assembling Egypt’s first parliament in three and a half years, brought an end to a transition put in place by the army after it overthrew Mohamed Morsi, the Islamist president, in the summer of 2013.
But despite these democratic trappings, critics say Egypt’s new regime, led by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, has transformed the country into a more violent dictatorship than that of predecessors, along them Hosni Mubarak, a feared dictator.
