Political parties in Egypt were able to pass a difficult test on Monday evening at 5pm.
After months of constant negotiations, consultations, push-and-pull, joining and leaving coalitions, Egyptian political parties have submitted their paper work to the Higher Commission of Elections.
If all goes well, 47 political parties, the vast majority of which were formed in the aftermath of the January 25 revolution, will be competing in the first post-Mubarak parliamentary elections, set to start on 28 November.
Most of the parties have coalesced in four main electoral blocs, covering the political spectrum from right to left. The parties have finished all necessary bureaucratic paper work by the Monday deadline in order to contend for the heart and soul of the millions of Egyptians who will head to the polls at the end of next month.
The first major electoral coalition which will compete in the November contest is the liberal/left-of-centre Egyptian Bloc.
The Bloc is made up of the Free Egyptians party, the Egyptian Social Democratic party, and the Mubarak-era leftist opposition Tagammu party.
The liberal formation will run 233 candidates in unified electoral lists, to contest for seats in 64 election districts.
The ratio of candidates within the lists will be as follows: 10 per cent for Tagammu, 40 per cent for the Egyptian Social Democratic party and 50 per cent for the Free Egyptians party.
The second major electoral coalition is the Islamist Alliance, led by the Salafist Nour party.
The Alliance includes four main parties: the Nour Party, the Asala Party, the Salafist Current, and the Construction and Development Party, the political arm of Al-Jamaa Al-Islamiya.
All four parties will be running on unified lists, under the banner of the Nour Party.
Emad Abdel Ghafour, the head of the Nour Party, told Ahram Online that the Islamist Alliance will be able to compete strongly in all electoral districts across the country. The Salafist Current, which is strong in Alexandria and the Nile Delta region, will give the alliance a fair shot at picking up seats in the north of country, while Al-Jamaa Al-Islamiya will strengthen the Alliance’s chances at winning seats in Upper Egypt, where it enjoys widespread support.
Abdel Ghafour denied that the Islamist Alliance is directed against the Brotherhood-led Democratic Alliance. He said that he believes that the participation of his Islamist Alliance in the election will enrich political life in Egypt, and that no one political party or alliance can rule the country by itself in the next phase.
He added that the alliance will divide seats it might pick up on 28 November among the different members of the Nour list based on two criteria: the relative political weight of each party and how much it contributes to the success of the overall list.
The third major electoral coalition which will compete in the November contest will be the Revolution Continues, which represents an electoral alliance between January 25 activists and various socialists.
The Revolution Continues, whose members have been busy organising street protests since Mubarak was ousted, scrambled to put together lists of candidates in the closing days of registration, but managed to successfully meet the Monday deadline.
The Revolution Continues includes the Popular Socialist Alliance Party, the Egyptian Socialist Party, Egypt Freedom, Equality and Development, the liberal Egyptian Current, and the Revolution Youth Coalition.
The left-leaning coalition will field 300 candidates in 33 electoral districts: 250 on unified electoral lists and 50 for independent seats.
Meanwhile, the Muslim Brotherhood-led Democratic Alliance, which most everyone else seems to be running against, has completed all paper work and is set to compete in every single one of the Parliament’s seats.
The Democratic Alliance brings together 12 parties under the leadership of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, and is competing in all 67 electoral districts around the country.
The two main members of the coalition are the liberal Ghad Party and the Nasserist Karama Party.
The Democratic Alliance awarded Brotherhood members 70 per cent of overall slots on the unified lists it plans to run in the elections.
Moreover, Muslim Brotherhood candidates will make up 90 per cent of candidates the Democratic Alliance plans to field for the one third of the parliament seats reserved for independents.
In all, the Democratic Alliance will be fielding candidates in 67 electoral districts.
The contours of the political debates that will most likely dominate everyday discussion in the coming months have also started to take shape.
For example, the Muslim Brotherhood has decided that it will use its age-old religious slogan of "Islam is the solution" as its main campaign logo to rally the faithful.
The constellation of Salafists grouped under the banner of the Nour party have made it clear to everyone that they intend to use any seats they win in Parliament to push for the implementation ofsharia (Islamic jurisprudence).
To shore up their "Islamist” credentials, candidates both from the Brotherhood and the Salafist alliances have been calling for the implementation of a number of socially conservative laws, such as ones which would prevent European tourists from wearing swimming suits on beaches.
Islamists of all sorts have hit the streets hard to provide a disparate assortment of community services to poor people struggling with low wages and rising inflation, as a means of beefing up their support among a wide segment of society.
Muslim Brotherhood volunteers have set up neighbourhood food markets where they sell vegetables and fruits at below market prices to poor people in order to combat rises in prices for basic foodstuffs.
In impoverished areas in Cairo, for example, Brotherhood volunteers work street corners, offering staple food items such as potatoes, at the total price of 5 kilograms for LE 8, and also selling meat at half the market price to those who cannot afford the expensive source of protein.
In Alexandria, the second largest city in Egypt, Salafist volunteers from the Nour party have taken to the streets to organise traffic in highly congested streets in different parts of the city.
To combat an out-of-control garbage crisis in the city, as in the rest of the country, Salafist doctors have been knocking on doors to raise consciousness among people about the negative health consequences of piling up one’s trash on the city’s pavements and streets.
Meanwhile, counting on endless amount of donations from rich supporters, the Muslim Brotherhood, taking a page from US-style election campaigns, is running buses on the “campaign trail” in cities such as Suez and others, to distribute information about its candidates.
Member groups and candidates of the liberal Egyptian Bloc have made it clear that they will run electoral campaigns that call for a modern civil state, and they will fight hard against the Islamists’ plans to create a theocratic one.
Samir Fayad, a leading member of Tagammu Party, told Ahram Online that his liberal Egyptian Bloc will be able to expose the hollowness of the Islamists’ campaign slogan of “Islam is the solution” as the election battle unfolds in the coming weeks.
Fayad also criticised the Islamists as “relics from the middle ages”, and asserted that the liberal/left Bloc will take Egypt in what he described as the “right direction.”
Mohamed Abu El-Ghar, the head of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, also directed his wrath against Islamists who use religion to reach political goals.
Speaking in the industrial area of Helwan, south of Cairo, shortly after Salafist leader Yasser Burhamy finished quoting the Quran to supporters in the neighbourhood, El-Ghar told potential voters that his Party and the Egyptian Bloc will fight against a religion-based state, and will focus around issues of social equality such as free, quality healthcare for all citizens and a decent education system.
Meanwhile, the Revolution Continues candidates will be campaigning on an electoral programme that will also focus on the redistribution of wealth in society towards the poor, and an end to military rule as well as all the repressive measures of the Mubarak years, such as the emergency law.
However, voters will not, in this historic contest, be only looking at Islamists or liberals or leftist forces, which were uniformly persecuted under the Mubarak regime.
Hundreds of mid-level members of the former ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), who have reinvented themselves in the post-Mubarak era by forming new political parties with revolution-friendly names (eight out of the official 47 at least by one count) will also be entering, or rather re-entering, the political scene.
For example, the Unity Party, which was formed by Hossam Badrawy, one of the last heads of Mubarak’s NDP party, has fielded 100 candidates to run in the elections.
Two political parties, the liberal Wafd and the Islamist Wasat, both with decent prospects of picking up seats in the polls, have opted out of participation in any of the major coalitions, deciding instead to run on their own.
Wasat, which split from the Muslim Brotherhood in 1999, flirted with both the Brotherhood's Democratic Alliance and the Salafist coalition in recent months. In the end, members decided to go solo, and have said that they will manage enough candidates to compete in the majority of electoral districts.
The Wafd Party, Egypt’s oldest liberal party, pulled out of the Brotherhood’s Democratic Alliance a little over three weeks ago, and announced that it is running on its historic record.
Still, in a seemingly bizarre turn of events, the Wafd Party has recruited some former NDP notables, who are searching for new political covers to walk back into the halls of power, to shore up its list of candidates and its electioneering budget.
Analysts at Ahram Center for Strategic Studies expect that more than 6,700 candidates (the total number of applicants for the job as of Saturday) for both the lower house (454 seats) and upper house (264) of parliament will spend a record amount of cash in electioneering, which officially starts on Tuesday, to win the votes of the Egyptian people post-Mubarak.
Candidates will most likely spend, according to those analysts, 20 billion Egyptian pounds (US$3.3 billion) in this historic election campaign, compared to the 7 billion Egyptian pounds (US$ 1.2) that candidates spent in the last Mubarak-era vote in late 2010.
No comments:
Post a Comment