Current President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi is likely to obtain a third term despite the country facing a severe economic crisis.
Egyptians are voting in a presidential election overshadowed by the war in neighboring Gaza and economic problems, with current President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi likely to seek a third term.
Polling stations opened their doors at nine in the morning (07:00 GMT) on Sunday, with dozens of voters lining up in front of polling stations in central Cairo amid tight security measures.
Voting is scheduled to continue until Tuesday, between 9am and 9pm (07:00-19:00 GMT) daily, and official results will be announced on December 18.
About 67 million people are entitled to vote, and all eyes will be on the participation rate after successive previous elections witnessed low participation rates.
Analysts say the economy is top of mind for voters in Sunday’s election, as the country suffers the most severe financial crisis in its modern history – and inflation has hovered near 40 percent after its currency, the Egyptian pound, lost half its value since March. .
Even before the current crisis, about two-thirds of the country’s population of about 106 million people lived at or below the poverty line.
Despite Egypt’s pain, a decade-long crackdown on dissent has eliminated any serious opposition to Sisi, the fifth president to leave the army since 1952.
Under his rule, Egypt imprisoned thousands of political prisoners, and while the presidential pardon commission released about 1,000 prisoners in one year, human rights groups say three to four times that number were arrested during the same period.
At the same time, Egyptians paid little attention to the electoral campaigns that took place in light of the Israeli war on Gaza.
Competitors unknown
The other three candidates are relatively unknown among the public: Farid Zahran, leader of the left-leaning Egyptian Social Democratic Party; Abd al-Sanad al-Yamama, of the Wafd Party, a century-old but relatively marginal party; And Hazem Omar, from the Republican People’s Party.
Sisi, a retired Egyptian army field marshal, came to power in 2013 after leading the overthrow of the country’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi. The Muslim Brotherhood, to which Morsi belonged, was banned following the 2013 coup.
In the 2014 and 2018 elections, he achieved landslide victories with more than 96 percent of the votes, according to official results.
Al-Sisi later extended the presidential term from four to six years, and amended the constitution to raise the maximum limit for successive term terms from two to three.
The current president is not without supporters, many of whom credit him with engineering the return of calm to the country after the chaos that followed the 2011 uprising that ousted President Hosni Mubarak.
From 2016 onwards, Sisi implemented a range of economic reforms that devalued the currency and reduced the number of civil servants.
These reforms, along with high-cost projects, including billions of dollars in new capital, have sent prices soaring, stoked public discontent and undermined Sisi’s support at home and abroad.
Under Sisi’s economic leadership, the national debt has tripled, while various mega projects – often led by the military – have failed to achieve their promised benefits.
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