Mona Makram Ebeid spent years as an outspoken member of the Egyptian parliament. Now an academic and a critic of government policy, she is no less in touch with the driving issues of the day. She shared a few reflections on her career, and on the role of women in politics, with the HPR.

Harvard Political Review: What do you feel are the best ways for women to become involved and influential in political parties?

Mona Makram Ebeid: First of all, it is important to encourage women to enter all the legislative committees—the defense committee, the budget committees—that they perceive as a “man’s business.” There’s no such thing in politics as a man’s business. Women have to enter everywhere, be aggressive there, and use their presence and their knowledge. Women’s issues are first societal issues. They should not be separated or isolated.

HPR: You have previously attributed Morocco’s relatively high number of female representatives in parliament to the coordination of women’s associations and their challenging of legislative and electoral codes. Do mechanisms exist that could produce similar results in the governments of Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries?

MME: I think that governments must be open to liberalization, to the respect of civil liberties, and to the empowerment of women. Women face tremendous traditional obstacles in our countries. Families don’t want to see women in the public space, and especially not in politics. My own family, which is an educated and progressive faculty, did not look with a benign eye on the fact that I was entering politics.

Men dominate the political scene. And governments do not have the political will to change this, no matter how much they may say that they want to empower or encourage women. In light of this, I believe that certain mechanisms must be put in place—perhaps electoral quotas that would set aside a certain number of seats to be allotted to women in parliament. Many people criticize that and say that this would be discrimination, but if anything, it is positive discrimination. Most of the Scandinavian countries started this way, and today half of their cabinets are women, many of whom got their start as parliamentarians.

HPR: What do you feel are Egypt’s strengths and weaknesses as a democracy today? And what shape do you see reform taking in the future?

MME: Egypt has a parliamentary legacy, one which was interrupted during the revolution in the '50s when the Nasser regime came to dominate the economic, political, and social aspects of the country. While this stretch of totalitarianism gave a lot of social benefits to the people, it brought up a whole generation not to even think for themselves.

But I believe that we have all the ingredients for a democratic system because we have professional cadres in every discipline. We have a very dynamic civil society which deals with a lot of issues: women’s empowerment, political participation, democracy, defense of civil rights, raising the awareness of people on human rights. We opposition groups want reform to go much faster—we want liberalization, we want more openness, and we want a two-term limit on presidential tenure, particularly if the next president is a young man.

The other thing that we want is more legislative authority. We want parliaments not to be rubber stamps. We want to have more executive branch accountability. We want to have more freedom of the judiciary. Now the government is trying to clip the wings of the judges, which is why we demand to have an independent commission on the elections.

I think the United States has a great role to play. It is very inconsistent. At one point it calls for reform in the Arab world, and democracy, and at another point it says, “No, we want stability.” This cannot go on. They must be steady and stick to their principles. And they should prod governments like Egypt’s, because of the importance of Egypt as a pivotal state in the Arab world. They should encourage reform and not be heavy-handed about it. You cannot impose democracies from outside. It has to be home-grown. And we know that the groups and the parties inside the country are demanding it.¨ ]]>