Incumbent Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is prone to safe a 3rd time period regardless of the nation dealing with extreme financial disaster.
Egyptians are voting in a presidential election overshadowed by struggle in neighbouring Gaza and financial woes, with the incumbent, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, prone to safe a 3rd time period.
Polls opened at 9am (07:00 GMT) on Sunday, with dozens of voters queueing in entrance of polling stations in central Cairo amid heavy safety.
Voting will happen till Tuesday, between 9am and 9pm (07:00-19:00 GMT) every day and the official outcomes are to be introduced on December 18.
Some 67 million persons are eligible to vote, and all eyes shall be on turnout after successive earlier elections mustered low participation figures.
Analysts say economy is on prime of voters’ thoughts in Sunday’s vote because the nation has been gripped by probably the most extreme monetary disaster in its latest historical past – inflation has hovered close to 40 p.c after its foreign money, the Egyptian pound, lost half its value since March.
Even earlier than the present disaster, about two-thirds of the nation’s practically 106 million individuals had been residing on or beneath the poverty line.
Regardless of Egypt’s afflictions, a decade-long crackdown on dissent has eradicated any critical opposition to el-Sisi, the fifth president to emerge from throughout the ranks of the navy since 1952.
Beneath his rule, Egypt has jailed 1000’s of political prisoners, and whereas a presidential pardons committee has freed about 1,000 in a single 12 months, rights teams say that three to 4 occasions that many had been arrested over the identical interval.
Egyptians, in the meantime, have paid little consideration to electoral campaigns which have taken place within the shadow of the Israeli struggle on Gaza.
Rivals not well-known
The three different candidates are all comparatively unknown among the many public: Farid Zahran, chief of the left-leaning Egyptian Social Democratic Celebration; Abdel-Sanad Yamama, from the Wafd, a century-old however comparatively marginal occasion; and Hazem Omar, from the Republican Folks’s Celebration.
El-Sisi, a retired subject marshal within the Egyptian military, got here to energy in 2013 after main the overthrow of the nation’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi. The Muslim Brotherhood, to which Morsi belonged, was outlawed within the wake of the 2013 coup.
Within the elections in 2014 and 2018, he gained landslide victories with greater than 96 p.c of the vote, based on official outcomes.
El-Sisi later prolonged the presidential mandate from 4 to 6 years and amended the structure to lift the restrict on consecutive phrases in workplace from two to 3.
The incumbent president just isn’t with out supporters, lots of whom credit score him with engineering a return to calm within the nation after the chaos that adopted the 2011 rebellion that overthrew President Hosni Mubarak.
From 2016 onwards, el-Sisi has undertaken a bunch of financial reforms that noticed the foreign money devalued and the variety of civil servants slashed.
These reforms, coupled with high-cost initiatives together with a multibillion-dollar new capital, have led to surging costs, fuelled public discontent and undermined el-Sisi’s help at dwelling and overseas.
Beneath el-Sisi’s financial stewardship, the nationwide debt has tripled, whereas the varied megaprojects – usually led by the navy – have didn’t ship on their promised advantages.