Egypt

As I may have intimated last week, political conference season is a particular kind of hell. Most of us just are not diverted by faked class warfare or efforts by Ed Balls to be more ‘butch’ than David Cameron. Anyhow – whilst the few remaining members of political parties come together to remind the rest of us why we want nothing to do with them, here are some things that are actually happening. 1). In a video posted on Sunday, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood preacher  Wagdy Ghoneim declared that liberals, modernists and secularists are all ‘infidels’ who must be tried and killed for abandoning Islam: ‘If they do not repent,

If you ever needed an indication of how the media spouts the propaganda of authoritarian regimes like loyalist apparatchiks faithfully repeating the party line then look no further than Iran. Coffee Housers will remember that last week I highlighted the damning speech given by Mohammed Mursi in Iran during the Non-Aligned Movement conference where he took the opportunity to slam the Syrian regime, describing it as having lost its legitimacy. Mursi’s grandstanding caused some embarrassment to Ahmadinejad given Iran’s unconditional support for Bashar al-Assad – but that’s where the embarrassment seems to have stopped. Keen to shield ordinary Iranians from any criticism of Tehran’s policy in Syria, Iranian state broadcasters simply mistranslated

The situation in Egypt remains perilous, as protests mount against the military government which has delayed announcing the result of last weekend’s vote. Preliminary estimates, overseen by a panel of judges, put the Muslim Brotherhood ahead by 900,000 votes. But this is being contested by former Mubarak henchman, Ahmed Shafiq. Election monitors are examining more than a hundred alleged cases of multiple election fraud. This is the latest popular grievance against the military government, which has prorogued parliament, deferred parliamentary elections and suspended rights of demonstration in recent weeks. The BBC reports that human rights campaigners and democracy activists are warning that a ‘meaningful transfer of powers’ will not take

A high-ranking member of Hosni Mubarak’s disgraced government, or someone from the Muslim Brotherhood? It’s hardly an enviable choice — but that is the choice facing Egypt in next month’s Presidential election, after the official results of the preliminary vote were released yesterday. For obvious reasons, neither candidate much appeals to the freedom-loving younger generation that set the country’s revolution a-rolling in the first place. So, overnight, we’ve seen a return to protests, anger, fire, etc. This is still an immensely divided polity. As grim as the situation is, it will come as little surprise to Spectator readers (or to anyone, really). The magazine has carried a number of articles

The Foreign Office has kindly responded to my Telegraph piece from last week, which suggested that they could do more to confront the religious cleansing sweeping the Middle East. In an extended version of a letter he has sent to the paper, the Foreign Office minister Alistair Burt says that his department is doing plenty: ‘Concrete examples include: Iraq, where the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary have raised religious freedoms and where the FCO is funding a further meeting of the High Council of Religious Leaders; Algeria where I recently met a delegation of Christian leaders to discuss the challenges they are facing; Egypt where the Deputy Prime Minister has

The Christmas weekend was, I’m sure you noticed, rich with political incident. And yet, from continued turbulence in the Middle East to continued turbulence in Chris Huhne’s career, few things stood out as much as the protests against Vladimir Putin in Russia. They were, by most reasonable estimates, the largest in that country since the fall of the Soviet Union. And they add to the wave of disgruntlement that has been swelling since even before this month’s disputed parliamentary elections. The wave, of course, hasn’t broken yet. But few seem sure about how far it will travel and how much change it will wreak. The best article I’ve read on

Islamists have won a landslide in Egypt, with the Muslim Brotherhood and the ultra-Conservative Al Nour party winning some 60 per cent of the votes cast. Future rounds of elections may benefit them further, as they take pace in more rural and conservative areas. Their success should be a surprise to nobody. Egypt is a conservative Muslim society. Islamists have been far better organised than the ragtag revolutionaries that ousted Hosni Mubarak, having run million-person charities for decades. They also benefit from being seen as un-corrupt and having been opposed to Mubarak for years. Further, they have been able to run on a simple slogan ‘Islam is the Solution’ without

Many thought the day would never come. Even as recently as yesterday, some doubted it would happen. But today Egyptians went to the polls in the country’s first parliamentary elections since Hosni Mubarak’s fall, hoping to take a first step toward democracy. Under a complex electoral system, voters picked both party lists and individual candidates. The final results are due by 13 January 2012. As it stands, the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest and best organised group, along with Salafists, are expected to do well in the vote — after all, Islamists did prosper in the elections in Morocco and Tunisia. But it is not assured. Voters may feel that the