Mubarak, Let Your People Go

Hosni Mubarak must think that George W. Bush is a chump. The Egyptian pharaoh apparently realizes that the U.S. president is serious about spreading freedom and democracy to the Middle East, but he still thinks he can get away with cosmetic changes that do nothing to seriously change the ugly nature of his regime.

Mubarak grandly proclaims that in this fall's presidential election other candidates will be allowed to challenge him for the first time. But then his handpicked parliamentarians pass electoral rules that make a genuine contest virtually impossible. To qualify for the ballot, candidates who don't belong to one of the officially approved parties will have to get the support of hundreds of Mubarak's yes men in parliament and the provincial councils. This prevents the leader of the officially banned Muslim Brotherhood from running. The liberal Al-Ghad (Tomorrow) Party has won official recognition, but its leader, Ayman Nour, may not be able to run because of bogus criminal charges that he forged signatures on a petition. The trumped-up case against Nour is only one sign that repression is intensifying in Egypt. Members of the Kifaya (Enough) movement and the Muslim Brotherhood, the most notable anti-government groups, have seen their peaceful public demonstrations broken up by riot police. Protesters have been arrested and roughed up.

There is little hope that Mubarak will give opposition candidates equal access to state-owned TV stations and newspapers, which regularly extol his virtues with embarrassing exaggeration. Nor can he be trusted to hold a fair vote. A group representing Egyptian judges has refused to supervise the balloting because, as one judge put it, they "won't participate in fraud." Even Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazief, on a charm tour of the United States this week, has to admit that Egypt won't see a truly contested election until 2011 at the earliest.

Nazief justifies this go-slow approach with soothing talk about how "democracy is an evolutionary process," and you can't go too fast lest Islamic extremists take control. But that's what the shah of Iran said in the 1970s. It turned out that his opposition to democratic reform made an Islamist takeover more, not less, likely. Same with Egypt: The less access that fed-up people have to the political process, the more likely they are to be seduced by the hard-line mullahs' siren song.