Abu Dhabi: Egyptian expatriates will go to the polls from Friday to cast their votes for a new president.
Two candidates are running for president — incumbent President Abdul Fattah Al Sissi and Mousa Mustafa Mousa, Ghad party leader.
Between March 16 (Friday) and 18, Egyptian expatriates will be able to cast their votes at 139 polling stations located in embassies and consulates across 124 countries.
Many of the UAE residents — the third largest Egyptian expatriate community in the world after Saudi Arabia and Kuwait — said they were not just picking a president, but sending out a message to the entire world that we support President Al Sissi in his socio-economic and political reforms.
Amany Abdul Hamid Mohammad, an accountant and resident in the UAE for 38 years, said four year ago she gave Al Sissi a mandate to uproot terrorism, create jobs and revive the economy, and “he had done a great job, so I will vote for him”.
She added Al Sissi regained Egypt’s lost position of moral authority and regional leadership in the Middle East.
“Under Al Sissi, Egypt has picked up the mantle and renewed its place as a political and ideological wellspring for the Arab and North African Middle East,” Hamid Mohammad said.
Engineer Mohammad Zahran, 57, said Al Sissi has managed to restore security and stability and revived the Egyptian economy.
Back home, elections will be held between March 26 and 28. The winner will be announced on April 2. Any run-off vote will take place between April 19 and 21 for expatriates and on April 24 and 26 in Egypt.
Under Egypt’s election law, the winner needs to get the absolute majority of valid votes; otherwise a runoff would be held at least seven days after the first vote.
The candidate who gets more than 50 per cent of the valid votes cast would be the winner and there would not be a runoff, according to the election rules.
Egypt’s presidential election would go into a second round on June 16 and 17 if there is no outright winner, but that outcome seems unlikely given Al Sissi’s popularity.
Polling stations abroad will be manned by diplomatic, consular and embassy administrative staff.
The Foreign Ministry, in conjunction with the National Electoral Commission (NEC), has held a series of workshops to train staff, and foreign missions have been provided with electronic scanners to scan voters’ ID cards and passports quickly.
The whole expatriate voting process will be monitored from an operations room at the headquarters of the Elections Committee in Cairo, said counsellor Ebrahim Lashin, chairman of the committee.
Minister of Immigration and Expatriate Affairs Nabila Makram Ebeid told a press conference in January that all Egyptian expats — regardless of their legal status — will be allowed to vote in the presidential election.
“Egyptian expats must bring their national identification card or valid computerised passports to vote at embassies and consulates in their host countries,” she said. As in other recent elections, there will be no voting for expats in Somalia, Libya, Syria and Yemen because of security issues.
The expatriate vote is held in advance of the domestic ballot to allow the National Election Committee to remove the names of voters who have already cast their ballots abroad from the voters’ list, and to give sufficient time for foreign missions to count the votes cast and forward the results to the committee.
