The Role of Elections: The Recomposition of the Party System and the Hierarchization of Political Issues

Between the two revolutionary sequences of January 25, 2011 and June 30, 2013, five elections were held in Egypt. These elections were intended to play a pivotal role in the transition to democracy by providing Egypt with regularly elected institutions and validating the transfer of power from the army to civilian politicians. The lifespan of each of these institutions, however, was ultimately truncated, either through judicial decisions or, more frequently, by a decree from the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). It was in this way that the legal consequences of the referendum held on March 19, 2011—which was supposed to amend the 1971 Constitution by providing a provisional constitutional framework during the transitional period—were nullified several days later by the “constitutional declaration” of March 30. The People’s Assembly elected in January 2012 was similarly dissolved by a Supreme Constitutional Court ruling on June 14, 2012. And on July 3, 2013, the minister of defense, Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi, relieved President Mohammed Morsi, who had been duly elected in June 2012, of his functions before dissolving the Consultative Assembly (Majlis al-Shura) that the voters had chosen in February 2012 and suspending the Constitution, which had just been approved by referendum the previous December.