Egypt Claims 83% Yes Vote for Change

Egypt's constitutional referendum won an 83% yes vote, officials said yesterday. The campaign was hit by sporadic violence after boycott calls from opposition parties and pro-democracy activists.

The interior ministry said 16.4m or 54% of Egypt's 32 million registered voters took part, a figure higher than in parliamentary elections.

Voters were asked to approve a constitutional amendment allowing more than one candidate for president, but effectively giving President Hosni Mubarak's National Democratic party power to select the candidates.

The turnout did not tally with independent reports of largely deserted polling stations, apart from government employees bussed in. "I visited four stations and didn't see more than 10 voters all day," a researcher told the Guardian.

Abdel Halim Qandil, of the Kifaya (Enough) movement, claimed in a TV interview that the real turnout was 4%.

The opposition Wafd party's newspaper said its reporters joined ruling party supporters and managed to vote at eight separate polling stations since officials did not check them against the registers. Others said they could not vote because they were not on the lists.

In some cities, plainclothes government agents beat protesters and dozens of arrests were made. In the US, President George Bush criticised the violence: "The idea of people expressing themselves in opposition to government and then getting beaten is not our view of how a democracy ought to work." Mohammed Mahdi Akef, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's illegal Islamist group, said the violence "proves that there is no intention of real reform as long as the despotic, autocratic mentality that relies on security forces and coercion controls the country's affairs."

Mr Mubarak has served 24 years as president; he has not said if he will run this September for his fifth six-year term, but is expected to do so.