Cairo: Egyptians in 17 of the country’s provinces on Saturday queued up at polling stations amid tight security to vote in the final leg of a referendum on a draft constitution that has polarised the nation and sparked violent protests.
President Mohammad Mursi’s Islamist allies stepped up their campaigns to secure a clear approval of the charter denounced by the opposition as flawed.
“We’ve become tired after all these months of trouble. We want to live in safety and earn enough money to feed and clothe our children,” said Salah Al Sharqawi, 52, as he stood in a long queue outside a polling station in the poor district of Imbaba in Giza near Cairo. “I did not read the constitution, but I want Egypt to become stable,” added Al Sharqawi, a keeper of a street corner kiosk.
Imbaba is considered a stronghold of Islamists in Giza, which has a total voter base of around 4.3 million.
Around 25.4 million Egyptians were eligible to vote in the final round of the two-phase plebiscite held against a backdrop of violent clashes between supporters and opponents. At least 77 people were injured on Friday in street fighting between both sides in Alexandria, Egypt’s second biggest city.
The constitution, drafted by an Islamist-controlled assembly, was approved by 56.5 per cent of the voters who cast their ballots in the first stage held on December 15.
The secular-minded opposition cited the percentage as a proof of a national division over the document and called on the second-round voters to overwhelmingly disapprove the draft.
“I am saying ‘No’ to a constitution, which tightens the hold of one faction on Egypt,” said Riham Hassan, a veiled accountant in her thirties, at a polling station in the upmarket Giza district of Dokki. “The [Muslim] Brotherhood and the [ultra-conservative] Salafists are acting as if they were the owners of this country,” she added, as anti-constitution slogans appeared spray-painted on the wall of the school where she was to vote. “Whatever they do, Egypt will remain free and diverse.”
The opposition says the proposed constitution, Egypt’s first since Hosni Mubarak’s overthrow in February last year, ignores women’s rights and undermines fundamental freedoms.
For Islamists, the document holds the key to Egypt’s political and economic stability.
“The final result will come to illustrate the scale of deliberate distortion and strategic misleading that employed the same methods of deception and lies used by the US in invading Iraq,” said Essam Al Erian, a senior Brotherhood official, implicitly criticising the opposition leader Mohammad Al Baradei who was the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency at the time of the US-led incursion into Iraq in 2003.
Al Baradei is a vociferous critic of Mursi who hails from the Brotherhood.
Yousuf Talaat, a media Brotherhood coordinator, expected that the final round of the constitution will show that a majority of more than 60 per cent of the ballots were in favour of the charter. “The Brotherhood has a wide popularity base in most of the 17 governorates,” he said.
The official result is expected either late Sunday or on Monday.
The approval of the charter will provide a badly needed impetus for Islamists whose popularity, claims the opposition, has dwindled. A final “yes’ vote will also clear the way for an election for a new legislature to replace the one invalidated by the country’s top court in June.
But if the document is voted down, Mursi will call within three months an election for a new assembly to write a new constitution.
