10 - 16 May 2001
Issue No.533
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 10 - 16 May 2001 Issue No.533 |
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Scramble for the Shura
Next week's mid-term elections for the Shura Council will pit candidates officially fielded by the NDP against NDP members running independently after the ruling party declined to nominate them. Gamal Essam El-Din reports
Some five million voters will head to the polls next week to elect representatives to the Shura Council, a consultative upper house with no legislative powers. A total of 851 candidates, compared with almost 400 in 1998, are setting their hearts on 88 seats in 68 constituencies.
For the first time in the council's 20-year history, the elections will be held in three stages between 16 May and 12 June. In the first stage, on Wednesday, 232 candidates will vie for 30 seats representing 21 constituencies in eight governorates: Giza, Qaliubiya, Menoufiya, Beheira, Fayoum, Beni Suef, Qena and Northern Sinai. Run-off elections will be held on 22 May. The ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) is fielding 33 candidates in this stage. There are also four women and one Christian. Opposition party candidates are not expected to exceed 10. The remainder are independents.
In compliance with last year's ruling by the Supreme Constitutional Court, the elections will be placed under the full supervision of the judiciary. A total of 7,661 judges will supervise 900 vote-counting and 7,182 polling stations. Interior Minister Habib El-Adli has said that the number of voters at each polling station will not exceed 1,500.
The elections will primarily pit candidates officially fielded by the NDP against NDP members who decided to run independently after the NDP declined to nominate them. Within this context, last year's People's Assembly elections witnessed 2,107 NDP members running independently against their party's official 446 candidates. Independent winners re-joined the NDP following the declaration of their victory. As a continuation of this phenomenon, which is widely regarded as anti-democratic, about 448 NDP members decided to run independently against the party's 91 official candidates in the Shura elections. In the first stage, there are some 180 NDP independents. This means that, in this stage, each NDP official candidate will be facing at least five NDP independents.
This phenomenon has led many analysts to level stinging criticism against the NDP. Many were tempted to regard it as a tactic by leading NDP officials to surmount the obstacle of full judicial supervision and ensure that the final results of the elections went in their favour. This, critics argue, is evidenced by the fact that the NDP was able to swell the number of its deputies in the People's Assembly from 170 to 388, after 217 victorious NDP independents re-joined the party's ranks. This is despite the announcement, ahead of elections, that all NDP members standing for election as independents would be dismissed from the party's ranks.
The Shura elections appear to promise more of the same. The general secretariat of the NDP decided on Saturday to expel 312 members from the party's ranks because they "violated" the party's rules and opted to stand independently in the Shura elections against NDP official candidates. Kamal El-Shazli, the NDP assistant secretary-general, asserted that the decision reflected the reformist trend espoused by the party. "Dismissing these non-conforming members will not be a big loss for the party. Thousands of others will join the party in their stead," El-Shazli said.
For his part, Youssef Wali, NDP secretary-general, said the NDP could not forgive the these members for having violated the decision of the electoral communities responsible for selecting the party's candidates. "They will not be accepted into the party's ranks even if they succeed in the Shura elections," Wali said.
And as was the case in the People's Assembly elections, the majority of the NDP independents ignored the party's decision. Many claimed they had decided to run independently because the party's general secretariat did not respect the electoral community's choices. They even asserted that the electoral community system, introduced this year for the first time, was not democratic. This system, they argued, did not place the selection of candidates in the hands of most, if not all, party members in a certain district. Instead, the district-level electors only included the party's local MPs and some members of the district or city council.
Salama Ahmed Salama, a prominent columnist with Al-Ahram, argued that this system was democratic only in form, since most of the limited number of community members were biased in their choices. "In content, it was revealed that the choices of most of these communities were dictated by the leading officials of the NDP general secretariat," Salama said. Rumours were also rife that members of electoral communities in some governorates, especially Cairo, Alexandria and Giza, had received substantial bribes from businessmen who managed to find their way on to the party ticket.
In Alexandria, although Ahmed Awad, an engineer, was chosen by the electoral community to stand in the Shura elections in the Bab Shark district, he was later replaced by Farag Amer, a businessman, on the instructions of the NDP general secretariat. Amer is chairman of West Alexandria's Borg Al-Arab Association of Investors.
The NDP appears poised to win 90 per cent of the Shura Council's contested seats, if only because its members form the vast majority of nominees and are running against each other in different guises. Another reason is the recent police crackdown on the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. Since campaigning for Shura elections began in April, nearly 30 Brotherhood members have been arrested. Nevertheless, it is now almost certain that six Brotherhood members will contest the Shura elections. They are: Mohamed Amer (an engineer) in Kafr Al-Sheikh, Hamdi Zahran (a professor of botany) in Beni Suef, Hussein Saba'a (a merchant), Ahmed Aql (a university professor), and Farag Abdel-Bari (a doctor) in Daqahliya.
The sixth is Mahmoud Amer, an engineer, who will stand for elections in the district of Ossim in Giza governorate. Amer managed on Saturday to win a ruling by the Supreme Administrative Court to stand for the Shura Council in spite of police objections. Only two Brotherhood candidates, Giza's Amer and Beni Suef's Zahran, are running in the first stage.
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