CAIRO: Ever since President Hosni Mubarak asked parliament for a constitutional amendment allowing multi-candidate presidential elections, speculation has grown around prospective contenders. While a handful of independent personalities have hinted at or announced their candidacies, the banned-but-tolerated Muslim Brotherhood has so far refrained from nominating one of their own. Elsewhere in the region, meanwhile, a number of other regimes have announced tentative steps toward political reform in the face of mounting US pressure to “democratize”.
“A lot of the governments fear what the US is doing now in the wake of the Iraq war,” says Simon Kitchen, a Middle East analyst at the New York based consultancy Eurasia Group. “Still, the momentum for political change has been there for a long time.”
Mubarak surprised many when he requested Feb 26 that parliament amend the national constitution to allow more than one candidate to run in presidential elections scheduled for September. Previously, voters were given a simple yes-or-no choice in a national referendum on a single nominee endorsed by two-thirds of the People’s Assembly. In the last four elections, that nominee has been Mubarak.
The amendment, however, still awaits the approval of the 454-member parliament. In the wake of the announcement, a number of political players suggested their intention to run against Mubarak, recently nominated for a fifth term by the ruling NDP, of which he is chairman. Proposed contenders have included the embattled Al-Ghad party leader Ayman Nour and sociologist and political activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim.
Most of the main opposition parties, however, have refrained from announcing candidates. “It has never been in the minds of Egyptian politicians to be able to challenge the president,” Mounir Fakhry Abdel Nour, a parliamentarian for the Wafd Party, the largest legally-recognized opposition group was quoted as saying in English-language weekly Cairo magazine.
However, these small, legally recognised parties are relatively toothless, commanding little grassroots support. Most eyes have turned instead to the Muslim Brotherhood, which enjoys enormous popularity, and has remained a potent political force in Egypt since the 1920s. In an indication of its influence, the brotherhood won 15 out of 24 seats in the March 19 board elections at the Lawyers’ Syndicate - a contest considered a microcosm of national politics.
The brotherhood initially reacted to the proposed constitutional amendment tactfully, praising the president for “understanding the popular demand for political reform.” Supreme guide of the group Mehdi Akef went so far as to say that it was the “duty of all Egyptians” to support President Mubarak in the elections, although Akef has since tempered this stance with a list of prerequisite reform measures, including a lifting of the 25-year-old emergency law.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service
