CAIRO - Egypt’s main Islamist parties have swept the results of the second round of election for a new parliament after Hosni Mubarak’s ouster, the electoral committee said Saturday.

“The committee stated that the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm, took the highest number of professional and worker seats, with 38 out of 49 of its candidates achieving victory,” Al-Ahram official newspaper reported.

“The Salafist al-Nour Party gained 13 seats and independents won five.”

As for the lists, the figures provided by the electoral committee for the second round showed that the Islamist parties together won 65 percent of votes.

The Freedom and Justice Party won 36.5 percent of the vote for party lists, with 4,058,498 out of 11,173,818 votes, Agence France Presse reported.

The al-Nour Party, the political arm of the ultraconservative Salafi movement, won 28.78 percent, with 3,216,430 votes.

The results mirror those from the first round of voting, held in late November, when the two blocs together won nearly 70 percent.

Meanwhile, the Islamists’ liberal rivals fared badly again in the second round, with al-Wafd − the country’s oldest party − winning 9.6 percent of the party list vote and the Egyptian Bloc, the main liberal coalition, just seven percent.

In Egypt's complex election process, staggered over three phases in six weeks, two-thirds of the 498 seats up for grabs are allocated proportionately to party lists, with the rest going to individual candidates.

The third round of the election will start on January 3, followed by another three-round poll for the senate.

The military, which has faced down days of deadly protests in November and this month, says it will transfer power to civilians after a presidential election is held by the end of June next year.

Source: OnIslam & Newspapers