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Egyptians have overwhelmingly approved in a referendum constitutional changes that could allow President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi to stay in power until 2030.
The National Election Authority said 88.8% of those who took part endorsed the proposals. The turnout was 44.3%. Sisi’s second term has been extended from four to six years, and he will be allowed to seek one more term in 2024.
The changes also expand the military’s power to intervene in politics and give Sisi more power over the judiciary. In 2013, Sisi led the military’s overthrow of Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, following protests against his rule.
Since then, he has overseen what human rights groups say is an unprecedented crackdown on dissent that has led to the detention of tens of thousands of people. National Election Authority chairman Lashin Ibrahim announced on Tuesday night that 26.4m valid votes were cast in the three-day referendum, which took place from Saturday to Monday. Another 831,000 ballots were deemed to be void.
On Facebook, President Sisi expressed his “appreciation and pride to the great Egyptian people”, who he said had exercised their political and constitutional rights and “dazzled the world” with their awareness of the challenges facing their country.
Before Ibrahim’s announcement, a group of opposition figures who met in the Turkish city of Istanbul dismissed the referendum as a “sham” and said they would consider the result “null and void”. They alleged that the government had denied Egyptians freedom to express peacefully opposition to the changes before the vote and that it had used public money to distribute electoral bribes.
