Is Egypt seriously going to try to hold an election next week?

Unlike in Tunisia, which successfully used a simple across-the-board proportional system to include many voices in the country’s legislative assembly, Egypt’s multilayered system is likely to marginalize new progressive, secular and liberal groups that lack grass-roots networks across the country.

The sidelining of smaller Islamic and secular parties would damage citizens’ faith in the democratic process, and the exclusion of the minority Coptic Christians from significant representation in Parliament could be catastrophic.

Copts are unlikely to vote for Islamic parties and, after October’s violent street battles between Christian demonstrators and the military, they have lost faith in old liberal movements like the Wafd Party. They are instead coalescing around niche parties like the Justice Party and the Free Egyptians. But these groups are polling at less than 5 percent — not enough to win more than a handful of seats. And if Copts are shut out of Parliament, they are also likely to be absent from the committee which will draw up the new Egyptian constitution.

The military has also retained an anachronistic quota, reserving at least half of the new Parliament for “workers and farmers,” a rule that has been used to manipulate election results in Egypt since the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser.