|
By
Paul
Schemm
Egypt’s
first-ever presidential campaign opened dramatically for the
ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) with a speech by the
president at the recently built Al Azhar Park. Designed and
laid out by the Aga Khan foundation, the park perches majestically
on the edge of the city on a former landfill, overlooking the
minarets of medieval Cairo. The president gave his speech to
a crowd of dignitaries and a few thousand young supporters decked
out in “Mubarak 2005” t-shirts and baseball caps,
merrily waving their signs and cheering at any excuse. After
the president had finished and left with his entourage, people
slowly began to get up from their seats. Suddenly, the large
video screens in the park went blank and there was the sound
of shots. The screens lit up with scenes of people running,
panicking and knocking over their chairs as a young Hosni Mubarak,
dressed in an ornate military uniform, was hustled away by bodyguards.
And then there was the briefest glimpse of Anwar Sadat, Egypt’s
former president, fallen.
The crowd stood in shock as rarely seen scenes from the 24-year-old
national trauma of Sadat’s assassination were suddenly
replayed before their eyes. Soon, though, the images on the
TV screens melted into more comforting scenes of a young Mubarak
taking charge of a traumatized nation and steering it on towards
future greatness. The film was not just about the president’s
achievements, however. There also were touching personal exchanges
where the president’s wife, Suzanne, recalled first meeting
her husband at the Heliopolis Club or the time the president
wept because his weighty responsibilities kept him from traveling
with his sick son.
“It was a hit, it was a major success!” enthused
Mohammed Kamal, the media coordinator for the NDP’s slick
advertising campaign during the presidential election. The 15-minute
infomercial, entitled Citizen and Leader went on to
play several more times on both local television and satellite
networks. “It resonated very well with people, because
it showed this image, the human side of the president as one
of the people, but at the same time he is a leader who can lead
the nation and take decisive measures,” Kamal said. “I
think those are the two main messages: He is a leader, but also
human.”
In fact, Citizen and Leader was only one of the many
media productions the NDP created for the campaign in an effort
to remake the president’s image. There also were a number
of shorter commercials highlighting other aspects of the president’s
campaign message and a number of music video clips (the latter
produced by the Ministry of Information)—In all of them,
Mubarak was presented as a man of the people, a strong, paternal,
and protective leader, but also a man in touch with Egyptians.
For a change, however, the president did not monopolize the
nation’s TV networks during the elections period, though
he still dominated them. In the past, parliamentary candidates
had no access to the broadcast media and instead just spread
their message with cloth banners and leaflets. In 2000, some
candidates tried handing out videotapes to supporters containing
their campaign messages. When it came to picking their president
however, Egyptians chose their leaders through a simple yes-or-no
referendum every six years. “Campaigning” was characterized
by a massive media onslaught telling everyone to vote “yes”
for the incumbent, with only a few brave opposition newspapers
calling for a “no” vote. Now, for the first time,
Egyptians witnessed the unprecedented sight of presidential
challengers airing political advertisements of their own on
state television. The new presidential election law originally
had banned political advertising, but the ban subsequently was
struck down by the constitutional court. Opposition candidates
also were granted a fixed, daily allotment of free time on the
terrestrial networks covering their campaigns
In general, all the campaigns displayed a level of media awareness
that was light-years ahead of the last round of national elections.
The NDP had an army of articulate workers calling up journalists
and monitoring the media, while both Al Ghad and Al Wafd had
active media departments albeit on a smaller scale. Ultimately,
the amount of money a campaign had determined the quality and
frequency of the campaign advertisements. Here, as in most things,
the NDP dominated the field. In the case of the competition
between the two major opposition parties Al Ghad and Al Wafd
for second place, however, it was the lesser-funded Al Ghad
with fewer ads that prevailed, suggesting that an engaging candidate
and plenty of real campaigning remain important deciding factors
in the contest.
The NDP Juggernaut
From its dramatic start at Azhar Park, the entire election campaign
appeared to be an opportunity for the reformist wing of the
ruling party to show its stuff. Certainly in the weeks following
the election, including at the party conference at the end of
September, the influence of the younger members, gathered around
Mubarak’s son Gamal, appeared total. While Gamal Mubarak
was never officially described as the campaign manager, he clearly
was a major moving force, appearing at every campaign rally,
though rarely close enough to the president to appear in the
same photo frame, as frustrated photojournalists often noted.
The NDP’s campaign itself bore all the hallmarks of a
more worldly and refined sensitivity to global standards of
electioneering. “Gamal Mubarak has his own personal sensibility
of how it works in the West,” observed S. Abdallah Schleifer,
TBS senior editor and professor emeritus of Mass Communications
and Journalism at the American University in Cairo. “The
staff running the campaign is very sophisticated and has experience
working in the West … They consciously set out to run
what you could call an American-style campaign.”
Certainly, the new style was much more sophisticated and savvy
than the campaigning strategy back in the days of the referendum,
when the campaign was the responsibility of the Ministry of
Information, then headed by party stalwart Safwat al-Sherif.
As Kamal explained, the old ways just would not have worked
in the new environment of multiple candidates. “Other
people were competing for the minds and hearts and votes of
Egyptians,” he said. “It would have been very awkward
to run a multi-candidate election using the methods of the referendum.”
The party turned outside for media expertise and hired a professional
Egyptian advertising company, Animation, to produce its television
commercials, as well as print and billboard advertisements.
“But of course we gave them the political guidelines,”
Kamal said. Unlike campaigns in the past that focused on print
or billboard advertisements, the vast majority of the NDP’s
advertising budget went to (very expensive) television ads,
Kamal said. The party’s ads appeared primarily on the
main Egyptian terrestrial Channels 1 and 2, and Dream TV, a
popular privately owned Egyptian satellite channel. In an interesting
contrast, the Wafd Party, which supposedly had the same LE10
million campaign budget as the NDP, put most of advertising
resources into print ads in the national dailies.
Presidential advertising had a dry run, in a way, back in April,
when Mubarak sat down with media mogul Emad Eddin Adeeb for
a seven-hour “fireside chat” that was broadcast
over three days on national television. Directed by Lenin el-Ramle,
one of the most commercially successful directors in Egypt,
the interview discussed the high points of Mubarak’s career
as well as giving a glimpse of the president’s human side.
The Citizen and Leader biopic mentioned above, by up-and-coming
director Marwan Hamid, followed the same pattern, albeit in
a much more succinct manner. Other ads followed a more targeted
approach, focusing on specific aspects of the president’s
platform. One focused on the president’s achievements
in the course of his 24-year-reign, another gave examples of
his leadership abilities during times of crisis. This ad, in
particular, played on people’s fears of instability by
showing a series of images of regional crises and violence,
juxtaposed with the firm hand and steady leadership of the president
in Egypt. The final ad, one often shown during campaign rallies,
featured the new image of the president created for the campaign—the
same image of him that appeared on a series of large billboards
under the slogan, “leadership crossing into the future.”
In this ad, “The president was pictured in a smart but
fashionable shirt and tie sitting at a desk on which was an
elegant writing pad and that most essential of all corporate
accessories, the Mont Blanc pen,” observed Dina Ezzat
and Shaden Sheab in the 18 August edition of Al Ahram Weekly.
In the course of the television commercial, he took that same
pen and wrote down on the pad all the campaign commitments he
was making to the Egyptian people, against a backdrop of idealized
images of peasants, workers and homemakers. According to Kamal,
these themes and messages were tested and refined through polling
and focus groups.
The professionalism of the NDP’s media campaign inadvertently
was highlighted in contrast to the thousands of freelance pro-Mubarak
advertisements that sprung up around the country in the last
days of the campaign. These banners were very similar to those
that festooned the city during the 1999 presidential referendum
and weren’t constrained by the careful image-making of
the new NDP. Using older images of the president showing him
in the dark “dictator” sunglasses and heavy suits
or untouched recent photos carrying the web of wrinkles that
have etched themselves on the president’s face over the
last 20 years, these posters were commissioned by supportive
businessmen and stood in stark contrast to the officially approved
material. One overzealous business owner put up an awkward,
ill-proportioned statue of Mubarak in the neighborhood of Imbaba
that was later removed when it recieved unwelcome media attention.
Al
Wafd: Rebirth of the Leader
Egypt’s oldest existing political party, the Wafd, made
a last-minute decision to contest the presidential election,
but their advertising campaign was one of the contest’s
most creative. Burdened with an uncharismatic candidate, 71-year-old
Noman Gomaa, the Wafd went farther than any other party in turning
its back on the traditional street rallies and parades, instead
opting for a campaign that was almost entirely media-based.
While the NDP held almost daily rallies as Mubarak gave speeches
across the country, and Ayman Nour of the Al Ghad party held
21 rallies in 19 days of campaigning, the Wafd Party held only
six rallies. Instead, the party’s LE10 million war chest
went entirely to fund a media campaign, which appeared mostly
on the pages of the major semi-official dailies. Wafd Vice President
Mahmoud Abaza explained that right from the start, the party
made the strategic decision to limit the number of rallies and
go for an “unprecedented” media campaign. The idea
made sense at the time, since early on in the campaign, Gomaa
lost his voice during rallies and then twice made disparaging
(and vulgar) comments about people in the crowd in front of
an open mike.
Gomaa’s face, however, did feature heavily in both the
print and TV campaign ads. Analysts described these ads as an
attempt to present him as the party’s historic leader
reborn. With an outstretched pointing finger under the slogan
“Let’s Really Change Egypt,” Gomaa was supposed
to call to mind the national hero Saad Zaghloul, the father
of the 1919 revolution. The party’s television commercial
featured Gomaa sitting at his ornate desk in his office, talking
about how it is time that Egypt sees political change. As the
camera pans around him, he calls on voters to “elect me
and make me accountable for whatever I do.” The commercial
ends with his promise to make a change. But as journalism professor
and TBS senior editor Hussein Amin observed, it was not a very
convincing message. “People wanted to see more,”
he said.
In fact, it was in their print campaign that the Wafd Party
really shone, producing a series of full-page ads that Magdy
Mehanna, a columnist for the independent daily Al Masry
Al Youm, called “highly skilled and extraordinarily
intelligent.” Designed by a Cairo University professor
of mass communication, the campaign used as its slogan “itkhanna”
or literally “we are suffocating.” The message was
that Egyptians were fed up and couldn’t take it anymore.
The opening ad featured a series of photos of frustrated Egyptians
and detailed common complaints such as poor education, the terrible
job market and the deteriorating health service. The ads were
sufficiently controversial for the major state-owned dailies
to refuse to carry them initially—until the government
itself had to step in and allow them to be run.
Throughout the campaign period, the ads appeared as stunningly
expensive double page inserts in national dailies like Al
Ahram, listing a different series of popular complaints,
including issues not addressed by the president’s campaign,
such as corruption. Accompanying these ads would be the standard,
smiling shot of Gomaa. Towards the end of the campaign period,
the print ads changed again, this time presenting the proposed
solutions of the Wafd party and its promises if elected. The
party also managed to put a number of billboards and posters
up around town, though party members allege that these often
were torn down by ruling party supporters. Anecdotal evidence
suggests that, at the very least, these commercials increased
people’s awareness about the Wafd party, which, despite
its long history, had not been a very high profile party in
the last few years.
Al
Ghad: The Enthusiastic Upstart
If the Wafd campaign was long on commercials and short on public
appearances, the campaign of the newly established Ghad Party
was the exact opposite. Gamila Ismail, the campaign’s
media coordinator and wife of presidential candidate Ayman Nour,
said at the beginning of the campaign that the party simply
couldn’t afford a major advertising campaign with a budget
of only around LE1.5 million. However, the party did manage
to get a number of impressive billboards up around the city,
including one visible from the 6th of October flyover in Cairo,
one of the crowded city’s main commuter arteries. Ayman
Nour’s penthouse home in Zamalek also was host to a huge
banner that overlooked a main bridge across the Nile. For the
most part though, around the rest of the city and in the countryside,
pro-Mubarak and even the occasional pro-Gomaa banner, swamped
Nour’s signs.
Ismail explained that with only around LE200,000 of the campaign’s
budget earmarked for broadcast advertising—and a minute
on national television running between LE6,000-10,000—the
decision was made not to rely too much on advertising. That
said, Ismail did develop a television commercial for the campaign
that emphasized Nour’s youth and vigor in contrast to
his opponents. The ad was sung to the catchy tune “Raise
Your Vote,” taken from a song by popstar Mohammed Mounir.
The commercial shows Nour mixing with people, in the streets
and on the campaign trail, and stresses the campaign message
of hope for a better tomorrow. “It was very good and it
appealed to a lot of segments of the population, of course,
because of the popularity of Mohammed Mounir and there is also
the promise of tomorrow,” Amin said. “It’s
very appealing and very powerful, especially for the youth.”
Few people saw the ad, however, and not just because the campaign
couldn’t afford to run it, but because at the last minute
a copyright dispute erupted with Mounir over the use of his
song. Though the lyrics of Mounir’s “Raise Your
Voice” from Youssef Chahine’s film The Destiny
had been changed and someone else was singing the song, the
two were unmistakably the same song and it had been used without
the singer’s permission. Mounir, who was once known for
his daring lyrics and oppositional stances to the government,
issued a complaint and the advertisement was held up while the
whole matter was resolved. Ismail and the Ghad Party alleged
it was all part of the government interference intended on hobbling
their campaign.
Advertising
Effectiveness?
It is difficult to draw conclusions about the effectiveness
of the NDP’s media campaign from its candidate’s
lopsided 88.6 percent victory, since the win can be attributed
to a whole host of political, historical and structural factors
unrelated to its advertising campaign. Still, the NDP did, by
most assessments, produce the most professional and attractive
media products. The ads and commercials presented a coherent
message that resonated with Mubarak’s supporters—namely
his leadership, reliability and experience.
What can be gleaned from the contest is the stunningly bad performance
of the Wafd Party, which took only 2.5 percent of the vote compared
to nearly three times that much for the underfunded Al Ghad
campaign. At first glance, this outcome appears to fly in the
face of conventional wisdom gleaned from Western election campaigns—that
big budgets and plentiful advertising can win a campaign. It
appears, however, that clever print ad campaign aside, the Wafd
Party failed to galvanize voters. “I guess it was because
of the poor campaign that was not really designed to appeal
to different segments of the population,” said Amin, adding
that their television commercial wasn’t very exciting.
“In my opinion this setting of Noman Gomaa sitting at
a very luxurious desk just talking—he’s considered
as elite and not really touching base with average Egyptians
and their concerns.”
The strength of the Wafd’s ad campaign was its newspaper
inserts, which, in a society that is only 50 percent literate,
perhaps did not reach enough people. The NDP’s Kamal noted
that his party made a conscious decision to eschew print advertising,
and that may have been a wise strategy. “We didn’t
want to do that, we thought that it’s not effective at
all,” he said.
There is also the simple fact that the Wafd Party campaign had
to include their candidate in the ads and they simply did not
have a very appealing product to sell. For those wanting change,
Gomaa did not seem sufficiently different from the incumbent
to be an attractive choice.
The successes of the Ghad campaign came despite their sparse
advertising campaign and probably had much to do with the indefatigable,
charismatic nature of their candidate who criss-crossed the
country in the course of his campaign and at the very least,
made sure he was on the television news every night. Aside from
Mubarak, Nour was the candidate with the most name recognition,
though not necessarily of the positive kind, due to previous
run-ins with the government. During the election, he was facing
charges for forging the signatures needed to establish his party
in the first place. While much of this coverage tarnished him
in the eyes of the public, it did set him apart as a clear challenger
to the status quo—something emphasized by his youth and
vigor.
In the end, none of the candidates’ campaigns succeeded
in defeating the biggest challenger to the whole system: voter
apathy. More than three quarters of registered voters didn’t
bother to cast their vote, though it is true the amount could
have been lower without the various media campaigns. A higher
turnout was expected in the parliamentary elections, which did
not have the same aura of a foregone conclusion as the presidential
contests. Television advertising, however, did not play such
a large role in these contests due to the lower spending ceiling
(LE70,000) and the lesser means of the individual candidates.
While the presidential contest of 2005 was never much in doubt
and the outcome seemed little different from the referendums
of yesteryear, the event did have major significance for the
Egyptian political scene. Never before had the Egyptians been
exposed to such a vigorous election campaign. Television advertising
was a key aspect of this change, especially since the airwaves
had long been the exclusive domain of the ruling party. For
the first time, the television was turned into a potential tool
of the opposition—one which with time and experience (and
more funding) they may learn to wield with more skill.
Paul Schemm is a reporter for Agence
France Press who divides his time between Cairo and Baghdad.
He has worked as a freelance journalist covering Egyptian politics
in Cairo for the past seven years and served as news editor
of Cairo magazine and editor of the Cairo Times.
[printer
friendly version]
|