Turnout low in Egypt's long-awaited parliamentary election

Many Egyptian voters shunned the first phase of a parliamentary election on Oct. 18 that President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has hailed as a milestone on the road to democracy but his critics have branded as a sham. 

Polling stations visited by Reuters correspondents pointed to a turnout of around 10 percent, in sharp contrast to the long lines that formed in the 2012 election, suggesting that Sisi, who has enjoyed cult-like adulation, is losing popularity. 

Elderly supporters of Sisi comprised a large proportion of those turning out to vote, while younger Egyptians boycotted an election for a chamber they say will just rubber-stamp the president's decisions. 

"It's not going to matter. It's just for show, to show that we are a democracy, and we have elections, and blah blah blah any nonsense," said Ahmed Mostafa, 25, who works in a lab. 

Ahmed Ibrahim, a 34-year-old accountant, had a similar view. 

"The youth in Egypt, our ambition in 2011, we were going to build the country - but then suddenly it was stolen from us," he said. "Ninety-nine percent of my friends are not going to vote." 

The government declared a half-day holiday on Oct. 19 for state workers, apparently hoping to encourage more voting. 

Egypt has had no parliament since June 2012 when a court dissolved the democratically-elected main chamber, then dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, reversing a key accomplishment of the 2011 uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak. 

In 2013 Sisi, then army chief, overthrew Egypt's first freely-elected president in 2013, the Brotherhood's Mohamed Mursi, then launched the fiercest crackdown on dissent in Egypt's modern history. Human rights groups say Egypt has about 40,000 political prisoners, many of them...