“It has reached me”: Decrypting the riddles of the president’s statement

When I first read President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s statement about the flagrant violations in the first round of the elections, the statement now known in political and media circles as the “It Has Reached Me” statement, I briefly assumed it came from a fake account and ignored it.

Three decades of covering the presidency taught me that Egyptian presidents don't issue statements primarily on Facebook. And although El-Sisi's interest in social media is known, he has not yet adopted Donald Trump’s habit of announcing decisions on such platforms.

The content of the statement was, to say the least, unusual. It openly acknowledged that violations had occurred, even as pro-regime parties praised the elections to be the fairest and truest expression of people’s will.

El-Sisi’s statement went so far as to call on the National Elections Authority/NEA to take the appropriate steps, even if it was canceling the first stage entirely. This came after all effective political forces in Egypt, including opposition parties, had accepted, whether convinced or grudgingly, that 2025 elections would not be competitive, and that the cake had already been divided among political parties based on security agencies' satisfaction with their performance.

Weeks after the Senate elections, which no one paid attention to, and even before the 2024 presidential elections, along with constant appeals for national unity in light of regional challenges and the arrogant Zionist enemy; everyone accepted that 2025 elections would be marginal.

We expected the parliament to continue, as it has since 2015, to be a tool for carrying out government demands and backing any laws, loans, or deals as instructed, without real accountability.

Echoes of the Criminal Procedure Law

But once reputable news websites carried the unprecedented "It-has-reached-me" statement, my head turned for what it meant, and what lay behind it. Yet I don't believe matters would go as far as canceling the results entirely, given the huge sums spent to secure spots on the closed, winner-takes-all lists.

Those lists guaranteed seats without campaigning, because in reality it is as if the MPs were appointed with no competition.

During the hours between the president’s statement and the NEA’s press conference the following day, I expected that results in some individual districts might be canceled, with a promise to improve conditions in the second stage.

That expectation rested not only on understanding the nature of the current regime and its disregard for parties and politics, but also on the example of the Criminal Procedure Law. In that case, the president suddenly decided to send the law back to the House of Representatives to amend articles and add safeguards and alternatives to pretrial detention.

After government representatives and pro-regime parties had heaped praise on the law, they suddenly celebrated the president’s refusal to approve it. In the end, the House adopted only limited amendments, far from the main demands of its critics.

Unfortunately, no one stopped to ask why the policy of pretrial detention for opinion-holders and dissidents had to continue in the first place, or why alternatives such as electronic tags, residence restrictions, or reducing the maximum period of pretrial detention from two years to 18 months were needed at all.

Drawing on my own two years in what was known as the National Dialogue, and before that my own 19-month pretrial detention in a political case, I was not the only one struck by the phrase “it has reached me” at the opening of the president’s statement.

Nor was I alone in sadly wondering which of the demands repeated by the opposition parties until their throats went dry, during and before the National Dialogue, had not “reached” the president:

Demands of the need to reform the electoral system itself and adopt a proportional list system instead of the absolute, winner-takes-all system, resulting in half the House being elected unopposed.

The demand to genuinely encourage citizens to run for elections by opening up the public sphere, starting with the release of prisoners of conscience and ending with allowing the media to reflect the diverse views and demands present in society and within political parties.

Only then could real competitive conditions emerge and the Egyptian voter feel their voice mattered.

Had these demands “reached” the president, had he implemented them, would we now be in a situation where he had to intervene in the work of the NEA, officially an independent body whose members are judges and which is not supposed to allow interference in its decisions?

Passing the hot potato

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the storm that followed the statement is that the overwhelming majority of the blatant violations documented on social media and by some media outlets had nothing to do with clashes between pro-regime and opposition parties. The latter are practically absent from the scene.

Opposition parties have split between accepting deal for a tiny slice of the cake through the National List for Egypt, and deciding to run for a very limited number of individual seats in the spirit of “honorary representation,” knowing they wouldn't win a single seat because they lack the financial resources and influence needed to secure victory.

The fiercest battles, and the mutual accusations of fraud, ballot-stuffing, and vote-buying, occurred between candidates representing pro-regime and “love of the homeland” parties and those who broke away from them; a classic case of siblings at each other’s throats.

This phenomenon reflects how fragile these parties are and how incapable they are of providing political cover for the regime, even though they are all running in the elections to support the president’s program and achieve his goals.

If the regime regarded these parties as real political entities, it would have been embarrassed by the scale of the defections and resignations that hit Nation’s Future, Homeland Defenders and the newly formed and extremely wealthy National Front.

The shameless spending to buy votes during the campaign or on voting days, only meant they see the seats as a source of benefits that will let them recoup their costs and more, regardless of the party banner they raise.

Even the relatively heated contests seen in some districts stemmed from traditional competition between families and local loyalties in Upper Egypt and rural areas, not from political affiliations. For all candidates raised the banner of rallying behind the president’s program.

Despite the displays of cohesion and iron-fisted strength by the state institutions, a war of statements broke out between the various Judges’ Clubs. Love of homeland and regime may be a sacred duty for all state bodies, but once accusations arose of involvement in fraud and of following instructions not to provide candidates’ representatives and agents with vote tallies, those involved rushed to disclaim responsibility and pass the hot potato.

If there had been genuine political will to hold fair elections, there would have been no need for judicial supervision at all. The 2014 constitution itself provided for ending such supervision 10 years after it began.

This was the very point explicitly made in the statement by the Judges Club of Egypt, which noted that those who supervised the elections were judges from the Administrative Prosecution Authority and the State Council, not bench judges or public prosecutors.

The outcome, as everyone knows, is that we do not face a parliament the regime fears, just as has been the case since 2015, especially after the Gaza war, the election of Trump in USA, and the general waning of attention to political reform, the easing of pressure for the release of detained opponents, and a muting of appeals to halt further arrests.

Yet the question lingers about the motives behind the “it has reached me” statement, and whether it was in fact a prelude to promoting the idea that this parliament is beyond reproach thanks to the president’s personal intervention.

That could pave the way for a step many do not rule out: amending the constitution ahead of the 2030 presidential elections, allowing El-Sisi to run again.

I hope those now saying “We’ve got the message” are wrong, and that what has surfaced is only a “siblings’ quarrel” between pro-regime parties and those who stand behind them. God spare us the evils of parliament.