5% Installment on Democracy

The candidates--some 100,000 of them --campaigned right through election day. Ministers and imams, grocers and streetcar conductors, they handshook their way right up to the polling boxes, passed out slips of colored paper with their names printed in helpfully large letters. The most conscientious elector (compelled to vote, or pay a $3 fine), retiring to his polling booth with a list of candidates six pages long, had a tough time finding as many as 30 names that he could recognize and mark. It took President Nasser himself four minutes to vote, though the day before he had gone over a list of all of the 210 candidates in his Cairo district.

After five years in power, President Nasser was setting out to create some sort of popular basis for his government. With his soldierly suspicion of all old-style politicians, he had decided to begin at the bottom. In last week's balloting Egyptians and Syrians elected 39,364 local councillors. These councillors would become members of Nasser's National Union, which, he insisted, is "not a single-party system but the framework within which the revolution now beginning will take place." Local councillors will choose provincial councillors, who in turn will elect a General Council for the whole United Arab Republic. From this council President Nasser himself will select a new National Assembly to draft the constitution for his "socialist, democratic and cooperative society."

Since he keeps the power to appoint the Assembly, Nasser's National Union only slightly modifies his present dictatorship. But he evidently intends that the local councils will take over some responsibility in municipal affairs, which have been absolutely controlled by the central government from the days of Ottoman Turkish rule. Says one Western diplomat: "The National Union is the first 5% installment on democracy."

In Egypt itself, Nasser long ago eliminated old-line political parties. But in his northern province of Syria, which he took over in 1958, there were still the powerful Baath socialists, who, though nominally outlawed like all parties, have been rewarded with five of 16 seats in the Syrian regional Cabinet for helping to put over the merger of the two countries. Last week, between the maneuverings of Nasser and the ganging up of landowners, businessmen and Moslem elders, who banded together in a conservative front, the Baath socialists lost control of Syria. Over both provinces Gamal Abdel Nasser reigned supreme.

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