Egyptian parliamentary election, 1923–24
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Yahya Ibrahim Pasha
Independent
Parliamentary elections were held in two stages in Egypt in 1923 and 1924, the first since nominal independence from the United Kingdom in 1922. The result was a victory for the Wafd Party, which won 188 of the 215 seats.
The British government unilaterally recognized Egypt's independence on 28 February 1922. The Kingdom of Egypt was established two weeks later. On 21 April 1923, a new liberal constitution was promulgated. A royal decree was published on 6 September of the same year, which ordered the holding of the first election under the new constitution. Nationalist leader Saad Zaghloul, who had been exiled to Aden, Seychelles and Gibraltar, returned to Egypt on 17 September to take part in the electoral campaign. Zaghloul and his partisans ran a campaign that exposed the problems of the newly established constitutional order. Zaghloul was especially critical of the electoral laws, which he viewed as incompatible with democracy since they made eligibility of candidacy to general elections conditional on income. The Students Executive Committee of Zaghloul's Wafd Party played a crucial role in the campaign.
The election was held over two stages. In the first stage on 27 September 1923, 38,000 electoral representatives were elected by the general population. These were announced on 3 October. In the second stage, 12 January 1924, the representatives elected members of the new Parliament.
Zaghloul's Wafd Party, which had run for all Chamber of Deputies seats, won a landslide victory, winning 188 of the 215 seats. However, it fared less well in the Senate because it was harder to find qualified candidates to run for its constituencies. It won 66 Senate seats. Wafdist voters included the medium and small landowners, urban professionals, merchants and industrialists, shopkeepers, workers and peasants.
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