Following the first week of elections since the fall of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s Islamists are claiming victory - as the Muslim Brotherhood captured roughly 40 percent of the vote and the ultraconservative Islamists finished a strong second. While there are two more election rounds to come and ballots for the first week of elections were only cast in one-third of Egypt’s provinces, the question has been raised: will Islamists rule the new Egypt?
“It would be hard to overstate what a catastrophe the Egyptian elections are shaping into,” said Andrew McCarthy in the National Review. “The Arab Spring, supposedly a victory for secular democrats, is increasingly looking like the start of a ‘grand jihad.’”
In The New Republic, Eric Trager writes that, “The Brotherhood remains firmly illiberal, believing that homosexuals should be stoned, women should be silenced, and thieves should have their hands cut off. The movement’s theocratic political vision will come to define the new Egypt.”
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