On the Campaign Trail in Upper Egypt

After the Egyptian military forcibly removed Mohamed Morsi, the country’s first democratically elected President, from office, in the summer of 2013, the government of Egypt repeatedly delayed elections, and the country spent three years with no parliament. In this week’s magazine, Peter Hessler writes about the 2015 parliamentary elections in El-Balyana, a remote area of Upper Egypt where citizens have devised local versions of political parties and idiosyncratic regional campaign traditions. Yusuf Hasan Yusuf, for example, one of nineteen candidates who ran for two seats in parliament last fall, had no formal platform, policy plans, or prospective legislation. Yet by campaigning entirely by going door-to-door he had built a successful political career. “These southern election campaigns reflect how, in a repressive but weak state, the problem isn’t just the ways in which the government prevents political freedom,” Hessler writes. “It’s also the flawed organizations that people build when left entirely to their own devices.”