About 28 percent of Egyptian voters cast ballots in a staggered parliamentary election dominated by pro-government candidates following a crackdown on the main Islamist opposition group, the election committee announced Friday. Ayman Abbas, head of the election committee, announced at a press conference that 28.3 percent of voters, roughly 15 million people out of a total of some 53 million, had cast ballots in voting that took place over more than six weeks.
Voters cast ballots for 120 seats that went to party lists and remaining seats for individual candidates. All party list seats went to the For Love of Egypt coalition, an alliance of parties and groups that support President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. The individual seats went to a mix of party-affiliated candidates and independents, Abbas said.
Experts say the new 596-member parliament is expected to have lawmakers who firmly back Sisi. The new parliament will include 28 presidential appointees, with the rest elected under the complex system of independent candidates and party lists. Several secular and leftist groups either boycotted the vote or were poorly represented. The low turnout came more than two years after the military toppled Islamist president Mohamed Morsi and unleashed a deadly crackdown on his Muslim Brotherhood movement, which has since been proscribed.
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