The final results of Egypt's three-stage elections for the 508 seat People's Assembly (or lower house of parliament), which were announced on 21 January, were virtually as Delphic as the earlier partial figures. 332 of the assembly's 509 seats are chosen by proportional representation on closed party lists, and of  these 38% went to the electoral alliance of the Ikhwan al-Muslimin (Muslim Brotherhood) and 29% to the more extreme Islamists of al-Nour, with the liberal and secular New Wafd and Egyptian bloc coming in a distant third and fourth. Individual seat results were not announced by the High Elections Committee, but the Ikhwan's political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), said on 21 January that it expected to take more than 47% of assembly seats and named Brotherhood official Saʹd al-Katatni as parliament speaker, an appointment duly confirmed when the assembly met for its inaugural session on 23 January. 

Clearly Egypt's first democratically elected assembly since the 1952 revolution is set to be dominated by the moderate Islamists of the Ikhwan/FJP, and if the comments of Ikhwan leader Muhammad Badiʹ on 20 January are anything to go by, that could mean problems as the assembly seeks to establish its control over the military. Mr Badiʹ not only suggested that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), which has been running the country for the last year, "must be held accountable for any mistakes," but also asserted the primacy of the assembly in the sphere of national security and the military budget. As far as concerns the former, Mr Badiʹ said a national security council should be set up but that parliament not the military should decide the membership of this body and that "the responsibility for oversight on all the people's institutions lies with the People's Assembly and that includes the military because it is a national institution just like all the other national institutions."  As for the military budget, "this is part of the budget of Egypt and it must be reviewed and studied and scrutinized by the People's Assembly…but through a special committee that includes those responsible on order to protect Egypt's military secrets."