CAIRO: Ahead of the polls, parliamentary candidates laid out their economic visions for Egypt during the transition to democracy. But while many tout “social justice” as their main goal, what’s less clear is how this will be achieved as the current focus is more on political concerns over drafting the constitution.
There’s an almost even number of parties on the left and right of the economic spectrum, but the weightier players — including the Freedom and Justice, the Free Egyptians and Al-Wafd — are right-leaning.
On the other end are the more obvious options, including Al-Tagammu and the Nasserist parties, along with members of El-Thawra Mostamera (Revolution Continues) alliance.
Mahmoud Salem, a member of the Free Egyptians Party, running in the Heliopolis and Nasr City districts, said he the economy is “a big interest of mine,” pointing to eliminating corruption as a top priority.
“By creating financial control in the budget and ensuring that the right funds are allocated for specific expenses, we can eliminate corruption in the state’s finances,” he said.
“For example, my idea is that 30 percent of the money you pay as income tax can come back to your municipal budget, in terms of education and public services,” he stressed. “I would also like that money to go towards collection of trash in the streets, for example; and go to healthcare in order to eliminate as much financial corruption as possible.”
Ensuring that there is proper funding allocated for young people who want to establish small and medium enterprises (SMEs) is also vital. “We have 3 million young Egyptians, young people who want to start up companies and can’t. I want to ensure that the money is there for them and we want to create the legislation to make it easy for them,” he said.
Salem added that if each one of these SMEs were created and thus hired five Egyptians, 15 million people would have jobs.
If the state budget is managed wisely and with transparency, Salem believes that the Egyptian government can have these funds available for financing SMEs.
Al-Wafd also believes in changing and reviewing all economic policies in the government.
Mohamed Serhan, a member of Al-Wafd’s executive bureau, said that the salaries of government executives must be one of the first things to be revised in order to adjust the state budget.
“There must be a complete change in all economic policies, government employees must have new rights, there must be a review in the way high government executives get paid,” he stressed.
The Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), the Muslims Brotherhood’s political arm, leans towards capitalist economic polices that are more to the right.
However, according to some experts, with few liberal or moderate parties reaching Egyptians on the ground, it seems that after these parliamentary elections the economy may take a right-wing turn.
Shadi Hamid, a director of research at the Brookings Doha Center, told Daily News Egypt that not only are most liberal and moderate parties not reaching out to people, they also have not laid out clear economic policies, unlike the Muslim Brotherhood.
Over the past years, Hamid stated that tens of thousands of Brotherhood members have benefited from “economic openness.”
“They are part of this new wave of businessmen. The Brotherhood is taking a direct page from the AK Party in turkey, they are part of a business elite, they want to adopt the same principles as the AK, which have a more conservative, right-wing approach because they want the same economic growth for Egypt,” he pointed out.
“The Brotherhood in Egypt is run by doctors, engineers and rich businessmen, not by poor people,” Hamid said on his Twitter account.
“Some of their major funders and supporters are major businessmen in the country, such as Hassan Malek and Khairat El-Shatter, who are two of the largest donors of the Brotherhood, and personally, they have a free market perspective as individuals,” said Hamid.
He added that Islamist parties are the only movements that have a really detailed economic program.
“It’s hard to distinguish yourself in the economy because everyone is for fighting poverty, creating jobs and social justice,” he said. “But I don’t think that parties are well aware of the differences in platforms, what Egyptians want is an improvement in their daily lives.”
During this murky economic period, there is a place for “right-wing” economic policies, he said. “Any government that is serious about reform is going to have to do something about the public sector, I believe that some of the [Muslim Brotherhood] think that and have talked about it.”
Hamid stated that, for example, some Muslim Brotherhood parties have discussed increasing higher education costs, in order to be able to provide better education and services.
Such practices adopted by the Muslim brotherhood, however, have been seen by experts as contradicting.
“It is really genius because they have very capitalist economic policies yet they speak very persuasively about social justice and they also provide help to poor civilians, that’s why people in the street are comfortable with them.”
With nearly half of all Egyptians living under the poverty line of $2 a day, voters today, according to Hamid, will be seeking a party that empathizes with their needs.
Mervat Shoukry, the campaign manager for Gameela Ismail, a liberal candidate, who is running as an individual and not for a specific party, said her first and foremost priority is to create a constitution that is written by a civilian government for the people.
“This is a short parliament, only lasting eight months, most candidates now have not really established huge policies and economic agendas,” said Shoukry. “The goal is that there is a unified power that creates a parliament representative of the people, because there can’t be one power or one main representative in the parliament affecting decisions.”
Shoukry, however, pointed out that one of Ismail’s main points is changing the minimum wage to bring it in line with recent economic changes and increase in prices of goods and commodities.
