May I have your votes please?

Hi there, happy New Year,

You might have been wondering where my blogposts went and why nothing about the elections in Egypt. Well the answer is not that simple. Let me explain; As you might know by now, Egypt is a big country, most of it is inhabitable desert. The majority of the population lives along the Nile and around the Red Sea, for obvious reasons. That population by the way consists of about 80,000,000 people, about 5 times the Dutch
population. Most of them living in the greater Cairo area. This is one of the tidbits I recently learned; Cairo is not just one city, it's a few cities together, or governerates they call them I believe (sorry, didn't do too much research). The main two governerates are Cairo and Giza. I live in Cairo and work in Giza. I guess that it compares with the Randstad in the Netherlands. There are about 20 mln people living in this area, commonly referred to as Cairo.

Back to the elections.

In the last bit of 2011 there were the elections in Egypt. These were about the parliament, the new parliament after the revolution. The weeks prior to the elections were full of disturbances again and
Tahrir square was the arena for fights between revolutionairiess and the army.
But even before that, it was decided that there would be several days with some time in between to do the elections! Or rather the voting. This because the government couldn't guarantee safety for all voters at all voting centers, which were schools and other public facilities. The voting was rather uneventful but than again, there were a lot of soldiers on the streets. Although I also think that in general the Egyptian people are not that 'riotish' in the first place.
So, once the first round was done, which took 2 days, there was a period of 2 weeks during which the army relocated and another 2 days of voting was done. First Cairo, than Giza. To me this was very odd, unprecedented in fact. But understandable.

Was this the better solution? Were there alternatives? Are these elections really democratic? Will the new parliament bring stability? Read about my view on things later this week.

Iwan