Electorate Looks to Mubarak to Chart Course for Egypt

For 18 years, he has presided over the Arab world’s most populous and maddening country. A plain, hulking man, he lacks the charisma of a Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nor is he renowned as a great peacemaker, like his slain predecessor, Anwar Sadat. Yet for most Egyptians at the end of the 20th century, President Hosni Mubarak has done just fine.

Living standards are rising. The country is at peace and respected by its neighbors and in the West. And there are great national projects afoot, plans to roll back the Sahara and build sparkling planned communities in the desert.

True, democracy is not at all what it could be--Mubarak has powers approaching the dictatorial. But he uses them softly, and the typical Egyptian doesn’t seem to worry much about the dearth of political liberties.

“We are an Oriental people--different from you Americans,” said Mossad Refai, a government official working on rural development in upper Egypt. “We have something called the head of the family. We belong to him, and we respect him. Mubarak is the head of our family.”

The Egyptian people go to the polls today to repledge their loyalty to the 71-year-old Mubarak in a national plebiscite that will give him a fourth six-year term. On the face of it, it is a hollow exercise. Mubarak faces no opponents. Under Egypt’s constitution, the electorate merely ratifies the presidential choice of the parliament, which is firmly in the grip of Mubarak’s party.

But what could be merely a parody of democracy has shown signs of turning into something more meaningful--a genuine expression of affection for the plain-spoken man who has outlasted his rivals, outlived would-be assassins and kept his chaotic country on a slow but steady course to the future.

Rallies, like one last week in this new satellite city outside Cairo, have been orchestrated throughout Egypt during the past month by the governing National Democratic Party.

Under a gaily colored tent, bused-in factory workers and young National Democratic Party volunteers waved placards and swayed to the music blaring from a huge loudspeaker, all singing the praises of Mubarak.

It’s hokey and artificial for sure. Across the country, factory owners have been ordered in no uncertain terms to have their employees present at the proper time and place carrying the assigned number of banners.

Indeed, the campaign’s trappings--the surfeit of Mubarak rallies, newspaper ads and banners that have sprouted all over, often with the name of the sponsoring company or organization prominently displayed--have been something of an embarrassment. As newspaper columnist Salah Montasser pointed out recently, after 18 years, “does President Mubarak need to be introduced to his people?”

Most Egyptians have long formed their opinions.

“He is very different” from Nasser and Sadat, said Samaya Seid, a young resident of Sixth of October City who was wearing a Mubarak T-shirt at the recent rally here. Nasser led the revolution, and Sadat liberated Egyptian land from Israel and gave the country lasting peace, she said. But Mubarak has been the builder.

“He is constructing Egypt’s revival,” she said.

In many ways, Sixth of October, with its 200,000 people, is emblematic of the Mubarak era. One of 14 “new cities” already built--with 40 more in the pipeline--it was designed to disperse Cairo residents from the narrow and congested Nile River banks and into the empty desert beyond.

On a new elevated highway, Cairo’s drivers zip westward above the smog-covered, piled-up tenements and apartment buildings of their ancient city, then cross over timeless palm groves and farming villages on the green edge of the Nile Valley, past the brooding Giza Pyramids in the distance and into the pale-yellow desert.

Where a few years ago there was only emptiness, now there is a beehive. Roads have been carved into the sands, laying out the outlines for new housing developments and private schools for Egypt’s nouveaux riches.

Beyond are apartment towers and an industrial zone with more than 600 functioning factories where clothing is made, General Motors cars are assembled and spring water is bottled for Egypt’s nearly 70-million-strong consumer market.

For years, Sixth of October (named for the date that Egyptian troops crossed the Suez Canal in 1973 and tried to recapture the Sinai peninsula from Israel) and the other new communities were derided as ghost towns, but now they’ve begun to take off, as roads and other infrastructure improvements, the availability of jobs and low-cost apartments for young families make the trek to the desert more palatable.

The upper classes, who hitherto have lived in downtown apartments, also are being drawn out by the cheap land and clean air, building wedding-cake villas with gardens for the children.

It is a dose of dynamism in a country that many had considered immune to change. Indeed, as government spokesman Nabil Osman pointed out, when Mubarak took over in 1981, Egypt was considered the sick man of the Middle East, economically. Now it’s being praised in some business publications as one of the world’s most promising emerging markets.

The country’s economic statistics are largely positive. It has $20 billion in hard-currency reserves, a national budget deficit of less than 1%, annual inflation of 2.9% and targeted growth for the year of about 5%.

There are worrying notes: The gap between exports and imports is growing, and, after seven years of exchange-rate stability, the government is having difficulties maintaining the Egyptian pound at 3.4 to the dollar.

But perhaps most important, the standard of living for the average Egyptian--while still low--has been rising: Per-capita income has doubled from the $580 a year in 1981 to $1,200.

Moustafa Elwi Seif, a political scientist at Cairo University, believes that Mubarak’s personal characteristics--his cautious decision-making and the absence of any taint of personal corruption--have helped his popularity.

But what has sealed it is the successful economic policies in the 1990s: the program of economic reform, privatization of national assets and imagination-capturing mega-projects, such as the new cities and massive irrigation networks in the Sinai and the Western Desert.

Mubarak and the regime do have strong critics--liberals who assert that police routinely trample on human rights; Islamists who say Egypt’s secular state is an affront to God; environmentalists who say greedy officials are allowing rampant development to destroy precious Red Sea coral and other delicate ecosystems.

Islamic extremists tried to kill him during a visit to Ethiopia in 1995, and a man described as a “thug” leaped out at Mubarak in a motorcade in Port Said earlier this month. The attacker managed to cut Mubarak’s upper arm with a penknife before being gunned down by presidential bodyguards.

Such incidents have tended to increase public sympathy for Mubarak but also leave many unsure what will happen after he is gone. No heir apparent is in sight, and Mubarak has consistently deflected requests that he name one, saying, “This is not a monarchy.”

The presidential campaign has been marked by an upsurge in discussion about the need for real political reform. Opinion makers are starting to suggest that Egypt’s authoritarian presidential system isn’t suited to the nimble economic competition the country will face in the next century.

Mubarak has told interviewers that he is planning to make far-reaching changes in his next term, but he hasn’t specified what they will be. His inauguration address Oct. 5 is likely to be the first clear indication of his thinking.

Seif, the political scientist, notes that this could be Mubarak’s last term--he will be 77 when it expires in 2005--and it would be an opportune moment to make such changes.

The legal opposition parties--a weak and marginalized group, some with a leadership still in place from the 1950s--have given Mubarak support for a fourth term, but they are making similar points.

They want Mubarak to grant Egyptians competitive presidential elections in the future and end the legal limitations to opposition activities, such as the stricture that forbids them to hold meetings beyond their bleak, impoverished party offices.

“There is a basic link between economic development and political development,” Ibrahim Desouk Abaza, of the liberal Wafd Party, said Wednesday at the opposition’s sole election rally, an event in a sultry downtown hall that drew only about 100 actual government opponents. “The citizen must know that his bread is linked to his freedom.”

Not so, argued government spokesman Osman, who said he believes that Mubarak was right to concentrate on economic development first and save political reforms for later.

Egypt’s recent economic achievements prove it, he suggested. Would the country have made the same progress if Mubarak had been “distracted” by divisive political and constitutional debates?

“Today we can give him credit for not opening up the Pandora’s box.”