Parliamentary elections in Egypt 1923/1924

1913  ← September 27, 1923 and January 12, 1924 →  1925
Elections to the Egyptian parliament
candidate	Saad Zaghlul Pasha	Abdel Fattah Yahya Ibrahim Pasha
Political party	Wafd party	Independent and other parties
Seats	188	27
percent	87.4%	12.6%
Before choosing Yahya Ibrahim Pasha (independent)		Elected Zaghlul Pasha (Wafd Party)

The parliamentary elections in Egypt in 1923/1924 were the first parliamentary elections in the independent Kingdom of Egypt , which had gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1922 .

background

The British government unilaterally recognized the independence of Egypt with the declaration of independence on February 28, 1922. Two weeks later, the Kingdom of Egypt was established. On April 21, 1923 a new liberal constitution was promulgated . A royal decree was issued on September 6th of the same year ordering the first elections to be held under the new constitution. The leader of the nationalists Saad Zaghlul Pasha , who had been exiled first to Aden , then to the Seychelles and finally to Gibraltar , returned to Egypt on September 17 to organize a political election campaign. Zaghlul and his supporters criticized the new constitutional order in the country. Zaghlul himself criticized the electoral laws, which he considered incompatible with democracy, as they made the permission to nominate candidates dependent on income. The executive committee of Zaghlul's Wafd party played a crucial role in the election campaign.

Results

The election was held on January 12, 1924. Zaghlul's Wafd party, which ran for all seats in the Chamber of Deputies , won a nationwide victory, winning 195 of the 214 seats. However, she had less success in the Senate as it was more difficult to find qualified candidates to run for the constituencies. She won 66 Senate seats there. The Wafd party's electorate included the middle class and small landowners, urban intellectuals, merchants and industrialists, shopkeepers, workers and peasants.

Members of the Coptic Christian minority received 10% of the seats, even though 25% of the total Egyptian population was Christian at the time. At the 1917 census, Christians made up a quarter of the total population in Egypt . The social origins of the Copts who were elected, however, were very similar to that of the Muslims: Copts mostly belonged to the poorest stratum of the population, but mostly wealthier landowners, medium-sized intellectuals, lawyers and doctors were elected to parliament. Two thirds of the districts that the Copts voted for were in Upper Egypt and one third in Lower Egypt . The Wafd party was the only party that had managed to get Coptic candidates from the Nile Delta region of Lower Egypt, where Copts were not very numerous, to enter parliament. She felt confirmed by the results and saw in them a clear sign of the party's strength, the will to secularism and national unity.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Arnold Joseph Toynbee : The Islamic world since the peace settlement. Oxford University Press, London 1927, p. 205.
2. ↑ Abdeslam M. Maghraoui : Liberalism without democracy: nationhood and citizenship in Egypt, 1922-1936. Duke University Press, Durham 2006, ISBN 0-8223-3838-6 , p. 205.
3. ↑ The Wafd Party. In: Bibliotheca Alexandrina . Memory of Modern Egypt Digital Archive, p. 5 , accessed July 22, 2010 (Arabic). 
4. ^ Robert Johnston , Arthur Goldschmidt : Historical Dictionary of Egypt. 3. Edition. Scarecrow Press, 2003, ISBN 0-8108-4856-2 , p. 412.
5. ^ Nationalists Win in Egypt . (fee required) In: The New York Times . February 25, 1924, p. 7. Retrieved July 22, 2010.
6. ^ Robert Johnston , Arthur Goldschmidt : Historical Dictionary of Egypt. 3. Edition. Scarecrow Press, 2003, ISBN 0-8108-4856-2 , p. 412.
7. ↑ Irmgard Schrand , Irmgard M. Sterner : Jews in Egypt: communists and citizens. Lit Verlag Münster 2005, ISBN 3-8258-7516-4 , p. 36.
8. ^ ^{A b} Mary Ann Fay: Egypt: The Rise and Decline of the Wafd, 1924-39. Retrieved July 22, 2010 . 
9. ^ Sana Hassan: Christians versus Muslims in Modern Egypt: The Century-Long Struggle for Coptic Equality . Oxford University Press US, New York 2003, ISBN 0-19-513868-6 , pp. 40 ( limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed July 22, 2010]).
10. ^ Martin Sicker: The Middle East in the Twentieth Century . Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001, ISBN 0-275-96893-6 , pp. 107 ( limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed July 22, 2010]).