The pink card is gone, but so are the voters

Twenty years ago, I cast my first parliamentary ballot. I had to return to my hometown, Damietta, to obtain the mandatory “pink voter card”; the one officials stamped each time I voted.

I never knew why it was pink, but my friends and I carried it with the reverence of a passport. Whatever the election’s outcome, we treated it as proof of belonging to a civic moment. A few of us even went so far as to laminate it.

Yet that pink card was an instrument of political monopoly. It transformed a routine administrative formality into a tool of exclusion. Fragile and easy to misplace, it quietly narrowed the electorate.

After the January 2011 revolution, while covering the committee on constitutional amendments chaired by judge Tarek El-Bishry, I watched wide-ranging negotiations among the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the Supreme Constitutional Court, and the State Council to take what was considered a “historic” step: abolishing the pink card and recognizing the national ID card as sufficient proof of eligibility, to guarantee every citizen’s right to vote and to expand participation.

Over the past two decades, I took part in every vote; presidential, parliamentary, and constitutional alike. Even in the hardest times and the least competitive races, I made the point of showing up, following the campaigns, and casting the ballot to gauge what we journalists call the “pulse of the nation”, to sense how people viewed candidates, parties, and the process.

Yet, I have never witnessed such apathy as surrounds the House of Representatives elections in Egypt today. The intrusion of TikTok and Facebook reels into campaign advertising has done nothing to revive public interest; it has only produced an endless scroll of viral clips that invite little more than ridicule and disapproval.

Who benefits from the monopoly?

From what I have seen firsthand, turnout at campaign events for individual-seat candidates in the Haram and Dokki districts has noticeably thinned. Videos on candidates’ own pages show entourages outnumbering the few voters who turn up, despite increasingly theatrical attempts to draw attention; one candidate delivering his speech from the bucket of a bulldozer, another parading through Sohag in a Tesla Cybertruck, the same model that only months ago Qatari police used to escort Donald Trump’s motorcade in Doha.

Meanwhile, candidates on the single national list, effectively competing against themselves for half the chamber’s seats, have managed only to deepen public confusion. Their faces and party logos crowd billboards and even monorail pillars, but without any coherent message. Friends and relatives ask about numbers and symbols, unsure who is running where, as the posters glorify individuals and parties rather than the list itself.

Some may assume these questions come from casual observers unfit to serve as a measure of public sentiment. But the confusion runs deeper, even among those closely attuned to political affairs. A quick look at the comments beneath election posts and explainers on social media reveals the same prevailing mood: indifference, abstention, and a growing disbelief in the very idea of meaningful representation.

It serves neither the state nor society to let the discussion of parliamentary elections sink into trivialities. The stakes are clear enough: the outcome could well produce a parliament of a single voice, one empowered to introduce major constitutional changes with no space left for dissent or oversight.

The devastating collapse in competition

Numbers confirm what the eye can already see: a collapse in competition. Excluding the half of the seats already awarded by the list, the remaining 284 are contested by just 2,645 candidates; a sharp decline from the 3,964 who ran for the same number in 2020. The average level of competition has fallen accordingly, from 13.9 candidates per seat to 9.3.^(*)Some regions record even bleaker figures. In Giza, the largest governorate in phase one, the number of contenders has fallen from 371 to just 170 for the same 25 seats; cutting the average competition from nearly 15 candidates per seat to fewer than seven.

In Matrouh, with its small electorate and tribal alliances, 27 candidates ran in 2020 yet now only 15 remain, competing for two seats; a drop from 13.5 to 7.5 candidates per seat.

Taken together with the empty campaign tents and stagnant social-media feeds, the picture leaves one conclusion inescapable: abstention, both from contesting and from caring.

People did not suddenly lose “passion.” What we see today is the inevitable result of deliberate choices: constructing a single list through alliances among indistinguishable pro-government forces, coordinating with select former MPs to concentrate competition in predetermined districts; and steadily excluding others through layers of legal and procedural disqualification.

Alongside the collapse in competition comes a new official narrative that defies both logic and political experience. It now promotes the winner-takes-all closed-list as the most suitable system for Egyptian voters—as if decades of mixed systems, combining individual and proportional seats, thresholds, and safeguards for under-represented groups, had not already taught us, since the 1980s, the cost of exclusion and the value of plurality.

No credible opinion polls have accompanied these elections to gauge competition or turnout across regions and age groups. Such data could help engage both the political elite and ordinary citizens in shaping a fairer system—one that channels dissent, encourages genuine participation, and draws in millions of young people who have never known what a vote truly means, even within the walls of their schools and universities.

It is painful to witness this scene unfold only a few years after two revolutions; each inscribed in the constitution as a rebellion against political monopoly in all its forms and effects.

Do those shaping today’s landscape not see the damage this suffocating closure inflicts?

This is a serious question because about a year before the 2020 elections, the National Center for Social and Criminological Research conducted an extensive study combining opinion polling and policy recommendations.  It examined the 2015 electoral model, when 448 seats were filled individually and 120 through winner-takes-all lists.

The study ended with a clear conclusion: adopt a proportional list system and abandon the winner-takes-all model, whose flaws it detailed in depth. Yet, in practice, the 2020 arrangement went in precisely the opposite direction, expanding the closed-list share to half the chamber.

Excerpts from the study were released in November 2019, but the full text was published only in print, after a long and telling delay, in 2023. Drawing on a wide sample of MPs, academics, experts, and civil-society figures, its findings dealt a direct blow to the credibility of the current system, exposing a tangle of structural flaws.^(**)

About 45% of respondents expressed dissatisfaction with the hybrid system of individual and winner-takes-all seats; while 30% were only “somewhat satisfied”. Many agreed it failed to produce effective representatives or genuine political diversity, squandered votes under absolute-majority rules, and left voters detached from distant, faceless list candidates.

Roughly seven in ten respondents favored changing the electoral system altogether to variously proportional lists and individual seats (36.3%), proportional lists alone (21.9%), or individual seats alone (20.2%). Fewer than one in four supported keeping the winner-takes-all lists in any form.

Nearly 90% of respondents called for an open national dialogue on how Egypt’s electoral system should be designed—one that brings together experts, legislators, and civic groups. Most also backed creating a technical committee to draft an alternative framework.

Participants broadly agreed on what an electoral system should do: represent citizens, encourage turnout through clarity and simplicity, guarantee fairness and equal opportunity, and revive the vitality of political life itself.  

But events since have moved in the opposite direction, leading us to the monopolized scene we face today. The pink card may be gone, and nearly 70 million citizens can now vote with their national IDs—at home or abroad—through a system as costly to administer as it is extravagant in advertising. Yet between the people and the essence of free elections stretches a widening gulf, one that feels ever harder to bridge.

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(*) Comparisons draw on the official candidate lists from the National Elections Authority for the 2020 and 2025 House elections.

(**) The poll appeared in a book later issued by the National Center for Social and Criminological Research, which also addressed the new Senate system established under the April 2019 constitutional amendments.