Four candidates are competing for the country’s presidency, with current president Abdel Fattah El-Sisi as the clear favorite.

El-Sisi and the other three contenders, Farid Zahran, of the Social Democratic Party; Abdel-Sanad Yamama, who represents the Wafd formation, and Hazem Omar, candidate of the Republican People’s Party, voted on Sunday in the Heliopolis district of the capital, shortly after the elections began.

In a press conference last Sunday, the executive director of the National Electoral Authority (NEA), Ahmed Bendari, stated that the voting process is taking place without problems.

The elections are being supervised by about 15,000 judges and are attended by more than 22,600 local and international observers, including 67 diplomats, according to the NEA, who will also announce the final results on December 18th if a second round is not necessary; otherwise, the second round would take place in January 2024.

In 2019, Egypt passed constitutional amendments that expanded presidential term limits from four to six years.

El-Sisi was elected for the first time in 2014 after obtaining 96.91 percent of the votes and for the second time in 2018 having achieved 97 percent.

The elections are marked by the difficult economic situation that the country is going through, with high inflation, and the Israeli aggression against the neighboring Gaza Strip, an issue that greatly worries Egypt.

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