CAIRO (AP) — Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, newly elected president of Egypt is being seen as someone who will bring security to the country, including its Christian minority.
"Sissi is the right man at the right time. His victory gives us Christians security and a perspective for the future," said Bishop Adel Zaky, Vicar Apostolic of Alexandria and supreme head of the Roman Catholic Christians in Egypt.
Garnering more than 93 percent of the votes, the former commander-in-chief of the Egyptian armed forces was elected on Thursday.
Before the election el-Sissi had resigned from all military posts.
"El-Sissi will leave no one wanting!" the 50-year-old shopkeeper in a Cairo slum barked when a younger man criticized the victor of the election.
Their heated argument — even though both voted for el-Sissi — shows the stormy public sentiment the retired field marshal will confront, even after winning nearly 93 percent of the vote in this week’s election. El-Sissi faces not only opposition from Islamists, but also a generational divide.
Many older voters embrace him. But among the young, ambitions for change have been unleashed since the 2011 ouster of autocrat Hosni Mubarak, and their expectations are low that another military man in power will fulfill them.
El-Sissi’s Islamist foes, furious over his removal last summer of President Mohammed Morsi, boycotted the election, as did more secular revolutionary youth groups. Many balked at voting when the outcome seemed certain. The government managed to boost turnout to 46 percent by threatening fines for non-voters and by abruptly extending the vote to a third day.
Some young voters backed el-Sissi, but with a sense of resignation and gloom over the future that could quickly turn to opposition.
In Abdel-Hakim Fathi’s tiny fishing supply shop in Cairo’s impoverished Dar el-Salam slum, this reality was on display. Ahmed el-Nabawi, 36, argued that while el-Sissi may be able to restore some stability, it will be at the cost of increased police abuses, corruption and injustice, all under the mantle of "fighting terrorism."
"It may look OK at the start, but once the ball gets rolling, it will be back to good old days!" he said, referring to the Mubarak era. "The police will be worse than they used to be."
Despite his skepticism, el-Nabawi voted for el-Sissi, hoping the career officer — backed by Egypt’s military and rich Gulf Arab states — can improve the economy enough so that he can pay off his taxi, sell it and buy a newer one. If that doesn’t happen, he said, he’ll oppose the president.
"You are being selfish," Fathi shouted. "The army never said a word without delivering."
"If you do nothing wrong and mind your business, no one will come after you," he added, dismissing concerns over a police state. "I have been around 50 years and nothing happened to me."
More than 1 million people live in Dar el-Salam and the adjoining Hadaiq el-Maadi neighborhood, crammed into an area smaller than Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Here, narrow, broken streets are lined with squalid apartment buildings. Rickety buses maneuver through mounds of garbage and construction work. The area is emblematic of the poverty most of Egypt’s 90 million people live in — and which has only worsened in the three years since Mubarak’s ouster.
The argument in Fathi’s shop, which pitted the shopkeeper and a man in his 60s against the younger el-Nabawi, illustrated the old world vs. new world attitudes among Egypt’s electorate.
An older generation, which brags about fighting in past wars and remembers a time of political repression but less chaos, is more welcoming of a new president from the military. A younger generation — the 32 million voters between the ages of 18 and 40 out of an electorate of 54 million — is no longer patient with restrictions on human rights, social mobility and basic freedoms.
"The military is a respectable institution," Fathi lectured the younger man. "Does it have thieves? Yes it does. I’m ready for them to rob me — but just provide me with security as well."
It’s true, he said, some younger voters stayed away from the polls because they saw friends killed in police crackdowns or had their own dreams dashed. But, he said, Egypt is facing an "international conspiracy" to destabilize it, led by Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood, so the country needs el-Sissi.
"No one else will be able to put up with what is coming," he said, adding that it was good the state extended voting to a third day to get out more voters to give el-Sissi a stronger mandate.
"No!" el-Nabawi shouted. "We looked worse this way. You were begging people to vote for him."
"People didn’t go out because they didn’t want the control of the police and army again," he added.
Other young people who voted for el-Sissi said they also had low expectations.
"I am expecting failure," said Walid Tharwat, a 37-year-old computer engineer. "The only reason I voted for him is security."
He opposed the 2011 revolt against Mubarak, he said, not because he liked the ruler of 29 years, but because he expected the chaos that has ensued. When he was in his teens, Tharwat added, the Brotherhood tried to recruit him as a youth leader, but he became disillusioned with the group’s controlling ways and he quit. He was happy to see Morsi go, he said.
But he is sure el-Sissi won’t improve people’s lives, and he expects the new president to clamp down after seeing two predecessors fall.
"The one in charge now has learned the lesson. He will keep control of all the levers. Not even five or six people will be able to gather again," Tharwat said. "These are our last elections."
Nesrine Mahmoud, a 34-year-old housewife in Dar el-Salam, said she backed el-Sissi after his ouster of Morsi, but during the election campaign, she didn’t like the way he lectured about morality, as if he would take over educating the young from their mothers.
"I don’t have to be Brotherhood to be against him. I just didn’t like the way he talked," said the veiled woman, after casting her ballot for el-Sissi’s sole opponent, leftist politician Hamdeen Sabahi.
Sitting on a bench in a narrow alley where drug dealers operated nearby, Khaled Mohammed said he gave up on politics after 2012 and didn’t bother to vote this time. That year, the 34-year voted for Morsi, not because he is an Islamist but because he thought the Brotherhood would end the corrupt hold on power of Mubarak’s cronies.
After Morsi’s year in power, he said, he believes the Islamists are no better than any other politicians.
Drawing deep on a cigarette, he said that Egypt is divided not on ideological lines, but between haves and have-nots, and el-Sissi won’t change that.
"He will step over three-quarters of the people for the sake of that other quarter," Mohammed said.
Bishop Zaky told international Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need that el-Sissi’s election “gives all Egyptians, Muslims and Christians cause for hope.” The Franciscan also stressed that el-Sissi had given no indication whatsoever of religious fanaticism in his public utterances and had also made no distinction between Christians and Muslims: "He is a religious person, but he sees religion as a private matter. His prime concern is his country. He demonstrated this when he saved Egypt from an impending civil war last year." In July 2013, el-Sissi was at the head of the military which deposed President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood after only one year in office.
Bishop Zaky rejected western criticism of Morsi’s ousting. "If General el-Sissi had not been at the head of the military there would have been a civil war. We would have faced the kind of situation that prevails in Iraq. We as a people had no possibility of combating the Muslim Brotherhood. The military only intervened when the people called on it to do so. The army did not act of its own volition."
But the West had not understood this, the bishop claimed: "Yes, Morsi was elected. But the people saw that under him the country was facing ruin. The people therefore withdrew their confidence to prevent worse things happening."
From a Christian point of view it is crucial, he continued, for the new President to implement the constitution which had been revised and adopted in a referendum after the fall of Morsi. "This is a carefully formulated document. If applied it will meet the needs of all sections of Egyptian society, be they women, workers, Christians or Muslims,” Bishop Zaky explained. He went on to say: "Egypt now needs a firm hand. For three years the country has been descending into chaos. Someone must apply the laws again and must not discriminate between sections of the population."
And today we celebrate...