Polling stations were closed late on Sunday following the end of the first round of elections to Egypt's House of Representatives, the lower house of parliament, and the process of ballot counting has started
CAIRO (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 26th October, 2020) Polling stations were closed late on Sunday following the end of the first round of elections to Egypt's House of Representatives, the lower house of parliament, and the process of ballot counting has started.
The parliamentary elections kicked off on Saturday and lasted for two days in the country's 14 provinces, including Giza, Faiyum, Beni Suef, Minya, Asyut, New Valley (El Wadi El Gedid), Sohag, Qena, Luxor, Aswan, Red Sea, Alexandria, El Beheira and Matrouh.
A total of 568 legislators are set to be elected, half of them through a closed list representation system. Some 63 million Egyptian citizens are eligible to participate in the elections.
Voting began amid restrictions imposed by health officials in a bid to tackle the spread of COVID-19. Voting centers were provisionally treated with sanitizers, while voters and electoral commission members were required to wear medical masks.
According to Egyptian political experts, the majority of parliamentary seats will be occupied by members of the pro-presidential Mostaqbal Watan party, also known as the Future of the Nation, which represents the largest bloc in the parliament.
Egyptian lawmaker and Mostaqbal Watan secretary-general, Hossam El-Khouly, told Sputnik that that the party had, ahead of the elections, formed a joint electoral list with another 12 political factions, including opposition ones, to guarantee the latter's representation in the legislative authority.
"Probably, an alliance of pro-government and opposition forces within the same list is unusual in politics, but the general weakness of the opposition does not allow it to obtain seats in parliament ... We compensated for this issue by adding the opposition to the alliance to ensure that its voices are represented in parliament and not outside of the body," El-Khouly said.
The results of the first round of the elections are scheduled to be declared before November 1, while the results of the second ballot, which will run from November 7-8, are set for release by November 15.
The deadline for Egypt's National Elections Authority to announce the final voting outcome is December 14. The previous legislative elections in Egypt took place in 2015.
The upper house of Egypt's parliament- the Shura Council - was abolished, according to the country's 2014 constitution. However, further amendments passed after the Egyptian 2019 constitutional referendum made the legislative authority a bicameral body, and the council was restored as the Senate.
The first round of the Senate elections were held in early August, and the run-off took place in the beginning of September.
