CAIRO—Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi won reelection to a third, six-year term in office, election authorities announced Monday. He ran against three virtually unknown opponents.
El-Sissi recorded a landslide victory, securing 89.6 percent of the vote, the National Election Authority said. Turnout was 66.8 percent of more than 67 million registered voters.
“The voting percentage is the highest in the history of Egypt,” declared Hazem Badawy, the election commission chief, who announced the official results in a televised news conference.
The vote was overshadowed by the Israel–Hamas war in Gaza on Egypt’s eastern border, which has threatened to expand into wider regional turmoil.
Egyptians voted “to express their rejection to this inhumane war,” Mr. el-Sissi said during a televised speech that followed the results announcement.
The North African country is also in the midst of an economic crisis, with monthly inflation surging above 30 percent. Over the past 22 months, the Egyptian pound has lost 50 percent of its value against the dollar, with one third of the country’s 105 million people already living in poverty, according to official figures.
A career army officer and defense minister at the time, Mr. el-Sissi led the 2013 military overthrow of an elected but divisive Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi, amid widespread street protests against his one-year rule.
Mr. el-Sissi was first elected as president in mid-2014, then reelected in 2018. A year later, constitutional amendments, passed in a general referendum, added two years to Mr. el-Sissi’s second term, and allowed him to run for a third, six-year term.
His victory in this latest election was widely deemed a foregone conclusion—his three opponents were marginal political figures who were rarely seen during the election campaign.
Hazem Omar, head of the Republican People’s Party, came in second with 4.5 percent of the vote, followed by Farid Zahran, head of the opposition Social Democratic Party with 4 percent. Abdel-Sanad Yamama, chairman of the Wafd Party, received less than 2 percent of the vote.
An ambitious young presidential hopeful, Ahmed Altantawy, dropped out of the race after he failed to secure the required signatures from residents to support his candidacy. He was considered Mr. el-Sissi’s most credible opposition figure and said that harassment from security agencies against his campaign staff and supporters prevented him from reaching the voter threshold for candidacy.
Ahead of the election, Mr. el-Sissi vowed to address Egypt’s ailing economy, without offering specifics.
Experts and economists widely agree the current crisis stems from years of mismanagement and lopsided economy, where private firms are squeezed out by state-owned companies. The Egyptian economy has also been hurt by the wider repercussions of the coronavirus pandemic and the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine, which rattled the global market.
Mr. el-Sissi’s government initiated an ambitious, International Monetary Fund-backed reform program in 2016, but the austerity measures sent prices soaring, exacting a heavy toll on ordinary Egyptians.
Last December, the government secured a second IMF deal on the promise of implementing economic reforms, including a floating exchange rate. The cost of basic goods has since jumped, particularly of imports.
