Egypt's main opposition party, the Muslim Brotherhood, said on Monday that it had lost most its seats in parliament in an election it charged had been "rigged and invalid". Human rights groups which monitored the poll in the Arab world's most populous nation backed up opposition complaints that it had been marred by fraud and violence but the government insisted it had been conducted fairly.
"All night the electoral committees in the different constituencies have produced results and then changed them," senior Brotherhood official Essam el-Erian told AFP. "These elections are rigged and invalid," he added. Brotherhood spokesman Walid Chalabi said the group had failed to win any seats outright in the first round of voting and that just 21 of its 130 candidates were sure of making it into next Sunday's second-round run-offs.
In the last parliament, the Brotherhood, which fields its candidates as independents to get round a ban on religious parties, held 88 seats - a fifth of the total. Final results from the first round were not expected before Tuesday but initial indications showed the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) of President Hosni Mubarak had made large gains in the 518-seat parliament.
In the run-up to Sunday's vote, the Islamists were targeted in a systematic crackdown by the authorities, which saw at least 1,200 of its supporters arrested, more than a dozen candidates disqualified and 11 members sentenced to two years in jail for campaigning and handing out leaflets. "Yesterday, fraud took place in the polling stations, while the ballot boxes were being transported to counting centres and in those centres," said Hamdi Hassan, who lost his seat in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, an Islamist stronghold.
Despite losing out to the ruling party, he said the Islamists had "won the respect of the people, their trust and increasingly their sympathy after what they saw yesterday." "We can take legal action to have the election invalidated but the ruling party does not comply with court rulings," he said. A Brotherhood campaign official in Alexandria said vote rigging had been widespread.