1923–24 Egyptian parliamentary election

The British government unilaterally recognised 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, which ordered the holding of the first elections under the new constitution. Nationalist leader Saad Zaghloul, who had been exiled to Aden, Seychelles and Gibraltar, returned to Egypt on 1 September to take part in the campaign. Zaghloul and his partisans ran a campaign that exposed the problems of the newly established constitutional order. He was especially critical of the electoral laws, which he viewed as incompatible with democracy since they made eligibility of candidacy conditional on income. The Students Executive Committee of Zaghloul's Wafd Party played a crucial role in the campaign. supporting Sa'ad Zaghloul and Safiya Zaghloul during the 1923 elections. In the background from left to right are the Egyptian politicians ʻAbd al-ʻAzīz Jāwīsh, Makram Ebied, Mustafa Kamil and Muhammad Farid. ==Electoral system==

The election was held over two stages. In the first stage on 27 September 1923, 38,000 delegates were elected by the general population, where each delegate represented 30 votes. These were announced on 3 October. In the second stage on 12 January 1924 the delegates elected members of the new parliament. For the Senate, two-fifths of the seats were appointed by the King, while the remainder were elected. ==Results==

Zaghloul's Wafd Party, which had run for all Chamber of Deputies seats, won a landslide victory, winning 179 of the 211 seats. It won 66 Senate seats. Wafdist voters included the medium and small landowners, urban professionals, merchants and industrialists, shopkeepers, workers and peasants. This was higher than the Copts' share of Egypt's population, which stood at six percent according to the 1917 census. The social origin of the Copts who had been elected was very similar to that of the Muslims: mostly wealthy landowners, but also a small number of middle-class professionals, mostly lawyers as well as a few doctors. Two-thirds of the districts that elected Copts were in Upper Egypt, and one-third in Lower Egypt. The Wafd was the only party that managed to get Coptic candidates elected in the Nile Delta region of Lower Egypt, where Copts were not very numerous. It felt vindicated by these results, which were a clear sign of the party's strength and a testament to its commitment to secularism and national unity. ==Aftermath==

The Wafd Party's resounding victory meant that King Fuad I had no choice but to ask Zaghloul to form a new government. He did so on 27 January, and Zaghloul was named Prime Minister of Egypt. The Wafd felt it had a mandate to conclude a treaty with the United Kingdom that would assure Egypt complete independence. As prime minister, Zaghloul carefully selected a cross-section of Egyptian society for his cabinet, which he called the "People's Ministry". He died three years later. ==See also==