Egyptian media is reporting that the top Muslim Brotherhood candidate has won the election for the presidency of the Engineers Syndicate amidst claims that the Brotherhood manipulated the election. According to a report in Al-Masry Al-Youm:
Magdi Khlosi, the top candidate on the Muslim Brotherhood’s “Engineers for Egypt” list, has won the presidency of the Engineers Syndicate, but the result has been challenged by members of a competing list, who claim that the Muslim Brotherhood illegally manipulated the election. The poll was the first in 17 years for the syndicate, which has some 475,000 members and 23 sub-syndicates. The syndicate had been under judicial sequestration, but judicial control was lifted on 14 August. Thirty-one candidates ran for the position of president, and 209 ran for seats on the syndicate’s board. The competition centered around two lists: the Engineers Against Sequestration (EAS) list and the Muslim Brotherhood list. The lists’ representatives stressed that their platforms are designed to improve engineers’ living standards and regulate the relationship between engineers and their employers. However, some engineers believe that the two groups have almost identical platforms and that voting is determined by political affiliations. Khlosi won 51,000 votes, 50.4 percent of the 103,000 votes cast, according to results announced on Sunday. Tarek al-Nabrawi, one of the top candidates on the EAS list, came second in the elections, followed by other independent candidates. Members of the EAS list filed a report to the attorney general, in which it said the head of the committee supervising the elections ignored complaints about disruptions to electronic registration during the electoral process. As a result, voters became confused, they said. According to indictment, the Muslim Brotherhood was responsible for this disruption and thereby manipulated the election. The results surprised a large number of syndicate activists, while newspapers have reported talk of a probable run-off between Khlosi and Nabrawi. The supervising committee announced on Sunday that the Muslim Brotherhood won the syndicate’s presidency and the majority of seats on the board in 14 sub-syndicates in various governorates including Giza, Qalyubiya and Assiut. However, the EAS won the presidency as well as most of the board seats on the Cairo sub-syndicate.
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The Muslim Brotherhood has sometimes been called the “Engineering Brotherhood” due to the presence of large numbers of engineers in its ranks worldwide.
Previous posts have reported on mixed results for the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in elections for the Journalist’s Syndicate and that the Brotherhood lost control of the physician’s syndicate for the first time in almost thirty years. In contrast, another earlier post reported that the Egyptian Brotherhood recently won a landslide in elections for the Pharmacists Syndicate. It is well known that the Brotherhood has long controlled many of the important professional organizations in Egypt.