1923–24 Egyptian parliamentary election

Last updated April 14, 2024

Parliamentary elections were held in two stages in Egypt in 1923 and 1924, the first since nominal independence from the United Kingdom in 1922. The result was a victory for the Wafd Party, which won 188 of the 215 seats.^[1]

Background

The British government unilaterally recognized Egypt's independence on 28 February 1922. The Kingdom of Egypt was established two weeks later. On 21 April 1923, a new liberal constitution was promulgated. A royal decree was published on 6 September of the same year, which ordered the holding of the first election under the new constitution. Nationalist leader Saad Zaghloul, who had been exiled to Aden, Seychelles and Gibraltar, returned to Egypt on 17 September to take part in the electoral campaign.^[2] Zaghloul and his partisans ran a campaign that exposed the problems of the newly established constitutional order. Zaghloul was especially critical of the electoral laws, which he viewed as incompatible with democracy since they made eligibility of candidacy to general elections conditional on income. The Students Executive Committee of Zaghloul's Wafd Party played a crucial role in the campaign.^[3]

System

The election was held over two stages. In the first stage on 27 September 1923, 38,000 electoral representatives were elected by the general population.^[4] These were announced on 3 October.^[4] In the second stage on 12 January 1924 the representatives elected members of the new Parliament.^[4]

Results

Zaghloul's Wafd Party, which had run for all Chamber of Deputies seats, won a landslide victory, winning 188 of the 215 seats.^[1] However, it fared less well in the Senate because it was harder to find qualified candidates to run for its constituencies.^[5] It won 66 Senate seats.^[6] Wafdist voters included the medium and small landowners, urban professionals, merchants and industrialists, shopkeepers, workers and peasants.^[5]

Members of Egypt's Coptic Christian minority received 10% of the seats.^[7] This was higher than the Copts' share of Egypt's population, which stood at six percent according to the 1917 census. The social origin of the Copts who had been elected was very similar to that of the Muslims: mostly wealthy landowners, but also a small number of middle-class professionals, mostly lawyers as well as a few doctors. Two-thirds of the districts that elected Copts were in Upper Egypt, and one-third in Lower Egypt. The Wafd was the only party that managed to get Coptic candidates elected in the Nile Delta region of Lower Egypt, where Copts were not very numerous. It felt vindicated by these results, which were a clear sign of the party's strength and a testament to its commitment to secularism and national unity.^[8]



Party		Seats
	Wafd Party	188
	Other parties and independents	27
Total		215

Source: Sternberger et al.

Aftermath

The Wafd Party's resounding victory meant that King Fuad I had no choice but to ask Zaghloul to form a new government. He did so on 27 January, and Zaghloul was named Prime Minister of Egypt.^[9] The Wafd felt it had a mandate to conclude a treaty with the United Kingdom that would assure Egypt complete independence.^[10] As prime minister, Zaghloul carefully selected a cross-section of Egyptian society for his cabinet, which he called the "People's Ministry".^[10] On 15 March 1924, King Fuad opened the first Egyptian constitutional parliament amid national rejoicing.^[10] The Wafdist government did not last long, however.^[10]

On 19 November 1924, Sir Lee Stack, the British governor general of Sudan and commander of the Egyptian Army, was assassinated in Cairo.^[10] The assassination was one of a series of killings of British officials that had begun in 1920.^[10] Viscount Allenby, the British High Commissioner to Egypt, considered Stack an old and trusted friend.^[10] He was thus determined to avenge the crime and in the process humiliate the Wafd and destroy its credibility in Egypt.^[10] Allenby demanded that Egypt apologize, prosecute the assailants, pay a £500,000 indemnity, withdraw all troops from Sudan, consent to an unlimited increase of irrigation in Sudan and end all opposition to the capitulations (Britain's demand of the right to protect foreign interests in the country).^[10] Zaghloul wanted to resign rather than accept the ultimatum, but Allenby presented it to him before Zaghloul could offer his resignation to the king.^[10] Zaghloul and his cabinet decided to accept the first four terms but to reject the last two.^[10] On 24 November, after ordering the Ministry of Finance to pay the indemnity, Zaghloul resigned.^[10] He died three years later.^[10]

Related Research Articles

Copts are a Christian ethnoreligious group indigenous to North Africa who have primarily inhabited the area of modern Egypt since antiquity. They are the largest Christian denomination in Egypt and the Middle East, as well as in Sudan and Libya. Copts in Egypt account for roughly 5–15 percent of the Egyptian population; Copts in Sudan account for 1 percent of the Sudanese population, while Copts in Libya similarly account for 1 percent of the Libyan population.

Egypt was a major battlefield in the North African campaign during the Second World War, being the location of the First and Second Battles of El Alamein. Legally an independent kingdom since 1922, and an equal sovereign power in the condominium of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, in reality Egypt was heavily under the coercive influence of the United Kingdom, a state of affairs that had persisted since the United Kingdom intervened militarily in the Orabi Revolt in favour of Egypt's Khedive, Tawfik Pasha, in 1882, subsequently occupying the country.

The New Wafd Party, officially the Egyptian Wafd Party and also known as the Al-Wafd Party, is a nationalist liberal party in Egypt.

The Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 was a treaty signed between the United Kingdom and the Kingdom of Egypt.

Saad Zaghloul Pasha was an Egyptian revolutionary and statesman. He was the leader of Egypt's nationalist Wafd Party.

Abdel Khalek Sarwat Pasha (1873–1928) was an Egyptian political figure. Sarwat served as the Prime Minister of Egypt from 1 March 1922 until 30 November 1922, and again between 26 April 1927 and 16 March 1928. He was instrumental in bringing Great Britain to issue its Unilateral Declaration of Egyptian Independence in February 1922, which ended the British Protectorate of Egypt and recognized it to be an Independent Sovereign State. He was also Minister of Justice (1914–1919), Minister of Interior, Minister of Foreign Affairs as well as the first Egyptian Attorney General (1908–1912).

Elections in Egypt are held for the president and a bicameral legislature. The president of Egypt is elected for a six-year term by popular vote after draft amendments to the 2013 constitution altered the presidential term limits from the original four years to six years.

Youssef Wahba Pasha (1852-1934) was an Egyptian Prime Minister and jurist.

The Wafd Party was a nationalist liberal political party in Egypt. It was said to be Egypt's most popular and influential political party for a period from the end of World War I through the 1930s. During this time, it was instrumental in the development of the 1923 constitution, and supported moving Egypt from dynastic rule to a constitutional monarchy, where power would be wielded by a nationally-elected parliament. The party was dissolved in 1952, after the 1952 Egyptian Revolution.

The Egyptian Revolution of 1952, also known as the 1952 coup d'état and 23 July Revolution, was a period of profound political, economic, and societal change in Egypt. On 23 July 1952 the revolution began with the toppling of King Farouk in a coup d'état by the Free Officers Movement. This group of army officers was led by Mohamed Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Revolution ushered in a wave of revolutionary politics in the Arab World, and contributed to the escalation of decolonisation, and the development of Third World solidarity during the Cold War.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Makram Ebeid</span> Egyptian politician (1889–1961)

Makram Ebeid Pasha was an Egyptian politician. Ebeid was the Wafd Party secretary-general between 1936 and 1942. He was also the Minister of Finance 1930, 1936–1937, 1942. Ebeid helped establish the Wafd Party in Egypt, and he believed in liberal politics. He was involved in the 1919 revolution with his friend Saad Zaghloul and was one of the people who were exiled as a punishment, but he eventually returned to Egypt with some of the noblemen of that time.

The Kingdom of Egypt was the legal form of the Egyptian state during the latter period of the Muhammad Ali dynasty's reign, from the United Kingdom's recognition of Egyptian independence in 1922 until the abolition of the monarchy of Egypt and Sudan in 1953 following the Egyptian Revolution of 1952. Until the Anglo-Egyptian treaty of 1936, the Kingdom was only nominally independent, as the United Kingdom retained control of foreign relations, communications, the military, and Sudan. Officially, Sudan was governed as a condominium of the two states; however, in reality, true power in Sudan lay with the United Kingdom. Between 1936 and 1952, the United Kingdom continued to maintain its military presence, and its political advisers, at a reduced level.

The Egyptian Revolution of 1919 was a nation-wide revolution in the Sultanate of Egypt against British occupation which lasted from November 1918 to July 1919. Occurring right after the end of World War I, the revolution served as the culmination of successive decades of opposition by Egyptian nationalists to the occupation, and was directly sparked by the British-ordered exile of Wafd Party leader Saad Zaghloul and several other party members.

The Sultanate of Egypt was the short-lived protectorate that the United Kingdom imposed over Egypt between 1914 and 1922.

King of Egypt and the Sudan was the title used by the Egyptian monarch from 16 October 1951 until the abolition of the monarchy on 18 June 1953.

Ismail Sidky Pasha was an Egyptian politician who served as Prime Minister of Egypt from 1930 to 1933 and again in 1946.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rawya Ateya</span> 20th-century Egyptian politician

Rawya Ateya was an Egyptian woman who became the first female parliamentarian in the Arab world in 1957.

The Coptic diaspora consists of Copts who live outside of their primary area of residence within parts of present-day Egypt, Libya and Sudan.

The Young Egypt Party also known as the Green Shirts was a fascist Egyptian nationalist political party. It is notable for counting a young Anwar Sadat as a member.

The Ittihad Party or Union Party was a right-wing political party active in the Kingdom of Egypt.

References

1 2 Dolf Sternberger, Bernhard Vogel, Dieter Nohlen & Klaus Landfried (1978) Die Wahl der Parlamente: Band II: Afrika, Erster Halbband, p294 (in German)
↑ Toynbee, Arnold Joseph (1927). The Islamic World Since the Peace Settlement (snippet view). Survey of International Affairs, Vol. 1. London: Oxford University Press. p. 205. OCLC 21169232 . Retrieved 2010-07-22.
↑ Maghraoui, Abdeslam (2006). Liberalism Without Democracy: Nationhood and Citizenship in Egypt, 1922–1936. Politics, History, and Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. p. 131. ISBN 978-0-8223-3838-3. OCLC 469693850 . Retrieved 2010-07-23.
1 2 3 Democracy is born Archived 2011-12-16 at the Wayback Machine Al-Ahram Weekly, 25–31 May 2000, No. 483
1 2 Goldschmidt, Arthur; Johnston, Robert (2004). Historical Dictionary of Egypt (3rd ed.). American University in Cairo Press. p. 412. ISBN 978-977-424-875-7. OCLC 58833952.
↑ "Nationalists Win in Egypt" (fee required). The New York Times . 1924-02-25. p. 7. Retrieved 2010-07-22.
↑ Schrand, Irmgard (2004). Jews in Egypt: Communists and Citizens (snippet view). Studien zur Zeitgeschichte des Nahen Ostens und Nordafrikas, Vol. 10. Münster: Lit. p. 36. ISBN 978-3-8258-7516-9. OCLC 56657957 . Retrieved 2010-07-22.
↑ Hassan, Sana (2003). Christians versus Muslims in Modern Egypt: The Century-Long Struggle for Coptic Equality. New York: Oxford University Press US. p. 40. ISBN 978-0-19-513868-9 . Retrieved 2010-07-22.
↑ Sicker, Martin (2001). The Middle East in the Twentieth Century. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 107. ISBN 978-0-275-96893-9 . Retrieved 2010-07-22.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Metz, Helen Chapin, ed. (1991). Egypt: a country study (5th ed.). Washington, D.C.: Federal Research Division, Library of Congress. p. 50. ISBN 0-8444-0729-1. OCLC 24247439. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.{{cite encyclopedia}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.

[DS-1] 1 2 Dolf Sternberger, Bernhard Vogel, Dieter Nohlen & Klaus Landfried (1978) Die Wahl der Parlamente: Band II: Afrika, Erster Halbband, p294 (in German)

[2] Toynbee, Arnold Joseph (1927). The Islamic World Since the Peace Settlement (snippet view). Survey of International Affairs, Vol. 1. London: Oxford University Press. p. 205. OCLC 21169232 . Retrieved 2010-07-22.

[3] Maghraoui, Abdeslam (2006). Liberalism Without Democracy: Nationhood and Citizenship in Egypt, 1922–1936. Politics, History, and Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. p. 131. ISBN 978-0-8223-3838-3. OCLC 469693850 . Retrieved 2010-07-23.

[AAW-4] 1 2 3 Democracy is born Archived 2011-12-16 at the Wayback Machine Al-Ahram Weekly, 25–31 May 2000, No. 483

[Goldschmidt-5] 1 2 Goldschmidt, Arthur; Johnston, Robert (2004). Historical Dictionary of Egypt (3rd ed.). American University in Cairo Press. p. 412. ISBN 978-977-424-875-7. OCLC 58833952.

[6] "Nationalists Win in Egypt" (fee required). The New York Times . 1924-02-25. p. 7. Retrieved 2010-07-22.

[7] Schrand, Irmgard (2004). Jews in Egypt: Communists and Citizens (snippet view). Studien zur Zeitgeschichte des Nahen Ostens und Nordafrikas, Vol. 10. Münster: Lit. p. 36. ISBN 978-3-8258-7516-9. OCLC 56657957 . Retrieved 2010-07-22.

[8] Hassan, Sana (2003). Christians versus Muslims in Modern Egypt: The Century-Long Struggle for Coptic Equality. New York: Oxford University Press US. p. 40. ISBN 978-0-19-513868-9 . Retrieved 2010-07-22.

[9] Sicker, Martin (2001). The Middle East in the Twentieth Century. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 107. ISBN 978-0-275-96893-9 . Retrieved 2010-07-22.

[:0-10] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Metz, Helen Chapin, ed. (1991). Egypt: a country study (5th ed.). Washington, D.C.: Federal Research Division, Library of Congress. p. 50. ISBN 0-8444-0729-1. OCLC 24247439. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.{{cite encyclopedia}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]

[8]

[9]

[10]

v t e Elections and referendums in Egypt
Presidential elections	1956 1958 1965 1970 1976 1981 1987 1993 1999 2005 2012 2014 2018 2023
Parliamentary elections	1883 1889 1895 1901 1907 1913 1923–24 1925 1926 1929 1936 1942 1945 1950 1957 1964 1969 1971 1976 1979 1984 1987 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2011–12 2015 2020 2025
Senate elections	1980 1983 1986 1989 1992 1995 1998 2001 2004 2007 2010 2012 2020
Municipal elections	2008 Next
Referendums	1956 1958 1968 1971 (1 Sep) 1971 (11 Sep) 1974 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1987 1990 2005 2007 2011 2012 2014 2019