Engineered Collapse: The final effort to polish Egypt’s parliamentary vote fails
The electoral engineering designed to shape Egypt’s 2025 House of Representatives—a process set in motion last September and widely anticipated to yield largely predetermined results—has unexpectedly fractured. Rather than cementing the political landscape, the opaque application of these controls has resulted in a chaotic scenario, raising more questions than answers regarding the efficacy and legitimacy of the entire exercise.
The ongoing parliamentary elections have entered unprecedented territory in Egypt’s legislative history, after the president waded into the process with a Facebook post that blindsided everyone. He called on the National Elections Authority/NEA to examine violations even if it meant canceling the entire vote. A constitutional exercise that began with praise for its integrity and turnout ended with two-thirds of its first-phase districts annulled. So far, the second phase has escaped the same fate despite similar violations.
The developments have sparked serious questions about the legitimacy and independence of the next parliament, which many political observers believe will move to amend the constitution to extend presidential terms.
Reading the unknown
In a revealing interview with popular TV host Amr Adib on the program El Hekaya, Farid Zahran, the leader of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, offered a pointed assessment of the current political climate. Zahran suggested that "some agencies, some circles, some leaders" had deliberately initiated a disruptive episode—such as the election annulments—to "sound a warning bell for the president," signaling that the established course of governance is no longer sustainable.
Zahran told Adib he believed “the president responded.” However, it is still not clear to many what exactly did the president respond to. Speaking to Al Manassa, the veteran politician acknowledged that “there is so much we don’t know and may never understand deeply. We’re not at the kitchen table. Many details will only appear with time.”
A senior party official, who asked not to be named, agreed with Zahran. He said the scenes unfolding in this election—unlike anything seen in past Egyptian votes—reflect “nothing but a conflict among several security bodies, and a dispute over how the process should be managed.”
On the other hand, a leader in the newly formed National Front Party rejected the idea that “an agency or authority intervened in the election process,” insisting to Al Manassa that such claims “remain speculation, not verified facts. No one knows for sure what’s happening. Talk about security-agency conflicts is just analysis or chatter—maybe true, maybe not.”
These discussions mirror the behind-the-scenes talk that Al Manassa reported last month that a security body had submitted a report to the president warning of violations and rising public anger.
A legal source who regularly handles cases before the State Council courts drew attention on Monday to the unusual timing and volume of the Administrative Court’s use of the legal principle of Refusal to Comply (Nukul) in its recent decisions. This principle was cited repeatedly in the court's annulment of the results across 30 districts, raising questions among legal observers regarding its application in such a broad and rapid manner.
The principle of Nukul applies when an administrative authority, such as the NEA, refuses to submit court-ordered documents crucial for deciding a case. While not conclusive proof of wrongdoing, this refusal may be interpreted by the court as an indication that the authority is concealing incriminating evidence, leading the court to rule in favor of the opposing party.
The legal source, who asked not to be named, said the Administrative Court’s reliance on this principle was “a rare precedent, perhaps the first of its kind across Egypt’s elections in the past 10 years,” even though delays in providing documents have happened before.
He suggested that this sudden judicial assertiveness in applying nukul may be linked to the broader political context and to the state’s drive to reassert control over the electoral landscape.
But Essam El-Islamboly, a legal expert and prominent Court of Cassation lawyer, disagreed. He said the court’s extensive use of the nukul principle to void dozens of district results was mainly due to the fact that the key documents needed to verify the integrity of the vote—counting reports—are held exclusively by the NEA, making them indispensable to uncovering the facts.
Cracks in the engineered legitimacy
Despite NEA executive director Ahmed Bendari’s claim that the mass annulments were driven by “technical and procedural reasons”—specifically the refusal of sub-committees to provide candidates’ representatives with official tally reports—the court’s written reasoning told a different story. It revealed a significant divergence between the NEA’s narrative and the factual findings of Egypt’s highest administrative court.
The NEA’s administrative and legal foul-ups documented in the court’s reasoning, which Al Manassa obtained, went beyond the failure to submit counting reports for challenged stations. In several cases, the authority submitted “incomplete” records or fewer documents than legally required to resolve the challenges. The court considered this “a failure to submit essential documents,” preventing it from applying the law to the facts.
The court called the NEA’s refusal “a grave error,” validating the challengers’ claims of serious miscounts and flawed tabulation that allowed ineligible candidates to reach runoffs—errors severe enough to blow the results out of the water. The ruling made clear that Bendari’s explanation did not accurately describe the depth of the electoral breakdown.
The shock inside the NEA over the annulments may reflect the fact that the court did not void the results for the usual reason—errors found in the count, as in previous rulings that overturned results in three districts in the 2020 elections—but rather because of the nukul principle.
With little clarity and almost no official information, Justice Party president Abdel-Moneim Imam laughed when Al Manassa asked him about the confusion. “If you figure out what’s happening, please explain it to me,” he said.
He continued, “There was this wave of doubt after phase one—we felt it and spoke about it. The president’s intervention made everyone do their job in a more relaxed way, checking and reviewing documents without pressure.”
The word “relaxed” echoed NEA director Bendari’s own phrasing in a press conference last month after the president’s statement.
Even so, rights organizations have demanded that the election results be canceled altogether, arguing the process “is subject to the will of the president,” and pointing out that party operations rooms documented numerous violations in the voting process.
But there seems to be no real intention to cancel the elections entirely—not least because, as one party source told Al Manassa, intense pressure is being placed on parties and candidates to see the elections through. “We get calls, and they’re practically begging us to let things pass,” he said.
For Islamboly, the situation “raises suspicion and doubt,” especially after the elections became a source of public frustration due to “widely known, bad practices.” He said members elected through such a process are “closer to appointees than representatives.”
But the senior figure in the National Front Party—founded this year by former housing minister Assem El-Gazzar and bringing together a mix of public figures, politicians and pro-government businessmen—believes that canceling the districts where violations occurred “actually protects the next parliament from doubt.”
He predicted that the next parliament may pursue “legal and possibly constitutional amendments,” which could make these elections “the last to use the list-based system, returning Egypt to a fully individual-seat system.” He called for “a legislative overhaul” of the closed-list system, districting laws, and the political rights law.
As Egypt continues producing what is expected to be El-Sisi’s final parliament—in a thoroughly muddled process with financial and political ramifications—the fog surrounding the election and the deliberate withholding of details from public view suggest that the dispute is merely over form. The goal now is to polish the image of the elections and their violations.