Parliamentary elections to take place in November

Elections for the People's Assembly – the lower house of parliament – will be held in three stages, the first commencing on 21st November. The announcement by the head of the electoral commission, Abdel Moez Ibrahim, has gone some way to allaying fears that Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) has no intention of transferring power to a duly elected civil authority. This followed a series of decisions by the Council, including the extension of emergency laws in time and scope, and restrictions on the media. This raised concern that the gains of what is known as the 25th January revolution were being reversed.

Elections to the Shura Council, the upper house, will start on 22nd January. Final details of the voting days and procedures, including constituency boundaries, are due to be released on 26th September, after which campaigning can begin. Assistant Defence Minister, and member of SCAF, Gen Mamdouh Shahin, said: “The People's Assembly elections will be held at the end of November over three stages of two weeks each, followed by the Shura Council elections on the same basis.”

The decision followed a meeting between SCAF and 47 political parties and movements.

The new parliament is due to set up a 100 constituent assembly to draw up a new or revised constitution. No date has yet been fixed for presidential elections.

The proposed electoral system will have half the seats chosen according to party lists, by proportional representation, and the other half by direct vote in constituencies, via the first past the post system. This structure is, in effect, a compromise between the new and the old.

But the Muslim Brotherhood has criticised the compromise as favouring the old ruling party and traditional political families who have long dominated political life in rural areas. Secretary-general of the Freedom and Justice Party, the electoral vehicle of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Saad el-Katatni said: "We reject the suggested election law [as we want] to block the remnants of the National Democratic Party (NDP) and prevent the use of money or tribalism …We will demand that all parliament seats shall be elected through closed proportional lists."

For more news and expert analysis about Egypt, please see Egypt Politics & Security.

© 2011 Menas Associates

Egypt: The Muslim Brotherhood has formed a new political party

Egypt's largest religiously-inspired political organisation, the Muslim Brotherhood, has formed a political party for the first time since it was founded in the 1920s. Over the past 80 odd years it was variously suppressed by the State or forced to live in the shadows. The Freedom and Justice Party (hizb il-hurriya w'il-adala) will be the vehicle by which it contests parliamentary elections, due in the autumn. The Muslim Brotherhood has already said it will contest up to half the seats, though it will not field a candidate for the presidential elections due later in the year.

It is not clear how different the party will be ideologically and organisationally from the Muslim Brotherhood . Secretary General of the Brotherhood Mahmoud Hussein declared that "this party will be independent from the Brotherhood but will co-ordinate with it."

Parties which are based on religion continue to be banned, although few will distinguish between the Freedom and Justice Party and its progenitor.

Some of the younger members of the Muslim Brotherhood have already raised objections to the way in which the leadership of the party was chosen. The decision was taken by the Shura Council of the Brotherhood rather than by an election of the founding members of the party.

The Shura Council named Mohamed Morsy as the chairman of the party, Dr Essam El-Erian as his deputy and Dr Mohamed Saad El-Ketatney as the party's secretary general. The three were obliged to renounce their positions on the Guidance Council of the Muslim Brotherhood , in an attempt to show a distinction between the Brotherhood and the party it has spawned.

El-Erian defended the decision to make appointments directly rather than through elections, saying time was pressing if the party was actively to contest parliamentary elections in the autumn.

El-Ketatny said El-Ketatny said they are finalising all the paperwork. "We will wait for a month as scheduled by the committee then we will start the activities of our party."

For more news and expert analysis about Egypt, please see Egypt Politics & Security.

© 2011 Menas Associates

The NDP tainted by medical care scandal and corruption

The National Democratic Party's (NDP) preparations for the upcoming People's Assembly elections are in full swing, with key figures reviewing the party's draft list of candidates and its draft platform.

This week, President Mubarak met with the NDP's Secretary General Safwat el Sherif and the head of the Policy Secretariat Gamal Mubarak to try to put the final touches to the NDP's political agenda, which will satisfy both the old and new guard inside the NDP.

There is an agreement from both camps that any new list will have to be based on a review of the performance of all its representatives from the outgoing 2005-10 parliament, with popularity and good reputation being decisive factors in determining which candidate will stand in the upcoming elections.

This criterion seems ever important given that the investigation into the growing medical care scandal continues, which has tarnished the image of many NDP deputies.

A number of NDP deputies have been charged with wasting state funds allocated for free medical treatment to their poorest constituents, and they are accused of manipulating the health care system to serve personal and family interests.

It has been reported in the Egyptian media that the NDP has prepared a list of 27 deputies implicated in the scandal, who are to be excluded from any new list. This indicates the desire of the NDP to clean up its image, and has been agreed with the old guard, which realises that it cannot continue to field unpopular candidates without the risk of further alienating the new guard inside the party.

Some names are guaranteed to appear on the final list, despite popularity and reputation. They include Fathi Sorour, the speaker of the People's Assembly, and member of the NDP's politburo, Zakaria Azmi, Chief of President Mubarak's Staff since 1989 and Kamal el Shazli, a long-serving NDP deputy known for his loyalty to the President.

Controversially, the list is likely to see an increased number of businessmen; more than the 2005 elections which witnessed 100 business candidates, of whom 68 won seats in the People's Assembly.

Those likely to appear on the new list include, Ahmed Ezz, NDP Secretary for Organisational Affairs, Mohammed Abu-Enein, Chairman of the Parliaments Industrial Committee and Tarek Talaat Mustafa, Chairman of the Parliament Housing Committee.

The final list is likely to be praised for its exclusion of deputies tainted by corruption and embezzlement but, at the same time, criticised for the growing presence of businessmen, who are perceived to have strengthened their grip on Egyptian politics through their infiltration into the central political, such as the People's Assembly, Shura Council and the NDP's Policy Secretariat.

For more news and expert analysis about Egypt, please see Egypt Politics & Security.

© 2010 Menas Associates