Issue No. 605
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26 Sept. - 2 October 2002 Issue No. 605 Home news |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
'Calculated change'
Political opposition figures speaking to Omayma Abdel-Latif were lukewarm in their response to the NDP's congress
When Rifaat El-Said, the secretary- general of the leftist Tagammu Party, was asked by a journalist about "the lessons" his party has drawn from the National Democratic Party's (NDP) eighth congress, held last week, his response would surprise few. Answering defiantly, he said that he hadn't taken any lessons from the event.
El-Said's response summed up not only the view from the left of centre, but also the prevailing mood across the political spectrum. The reaction was a mixture of frustration and faint hope that this "calculated change", as one opposition figure described the changes to the NDP, might usher in a period of greater democracy.
Assessing the aftershocks of the NDP's congress, opposition figures speaking to Al-Ahram Weekly did not stray from the routine script of reiterating the package of reforms they have been calling for over the past two decades. At the top of those changes are the direct election of the president and greater accountability by the government.
Some opposition leaders were, nonetheless, cautious and even reluctant to pass judgement on the NDP's reforms since, as Muslim Brotherhood MP Mohamed El-Mursi put it, "they fall within the party's internal affairs". They also steered clear of making comments about the people selected to fill the new and old NDP party posts. Such circumspection, however, did not prevent them from expressing scepticism about the nature of changes resulting from the congress. Some merely noted the gap between the expectations generated by the media hype and actual outcomes. Others, however, expressed frustration with the presentation as new of what they called the NDP's "old methods".
Even so, no one suggested that the congress was entirely insignificant. As El-Said put it, "The NDP reforms concern us because they reflect the mentality of those who rule Egypt." With respect to the extent of change that the congress implies, he told the Weekly on Sunday, "The way I interpret it is that we are still ruled by a one-party mentality and it continues to be a leader-oriented politics. The old mentality is still there." He did, however, say that the NDP's institutionalising of certain party functions, which had the effect of reducing the monopoly of a few over the internal activities of the party, was a positive step.
El-Said's argument that the party is leader-centric is shared by El-Mursi who challenged the NDP to practice the democracy and freedom of opinion that it preaches to other political parties. "This party is not mass- based," El-Mursi said. "All state resources and institutions", he continued, "have been geared towards serving and protecting the party, and this does not enrich the democratic experience in any shape or form".
Ibrahim Abaza, assistant secretary- general of the Wafd Party, while welcoming the changes, nonetheless described the outcomes of the congress as amounting to "a change of faces rather than policies". "This change means nothing if it is not coupled with a change to the context into which politics is being practiced, both by us and them," Abaza told the Weekly. "We cannot claim that after the NDP's eighth congress we live in a more democratic society. It is still a one-party system cloaked in a multi-party system, and that must change."
The roots of the country's multi- party system go back to November 1976 when the late President Anwar Sadat announced the transformation of right, left and centre tendencies of the Arab Socialist Union into three political parties. The new parties were the Socialist Liberals (formed from the right), the Socialist Misr Party (arising from the centrist tendency which later became the NDP) and the Nationalist Progressive Unionist Rally (emerging from the left). The following quarter of a century saw a dramatic increase in the number of political parties, rising at one point to 17 in all. This number, however, should not be taken as an indicator of a rich partisan life since only a handful of the country's parties could be considered to be effective political organisations.
During the past two decades, political parties in Egypt have been plagued by infighting and disorganisation. According to observers, one of the aftershocks of the NDP's eighth congress is that it brought to the fore questions about the parties' capacities to implement thorough- going programmes of internal reform.
Opposition figures, however, threw the ball back into the NDP's court, arguing that the NDP's reforms failed to address some of the most contentious issues in Egyptian politics, namely, democratisation, the peaceful rotation of power, freedom of the press, and the impact of emergency laws which fetter political parties activities. And while some NDP officials would deride the opposition for making the same demands for the past two decades, the Wafd's Abaza contends, "It is not that the opposition is reproducing an old discourse every time it is asked to reform itself, but the rules of the game should be altered completely since the gap between the constitutional framework, under which we should operate as political actors, and the ruling party's actual practices is getting wider by the day."
Opposition figures say that a unified front is necessary if they are to achieve results for their calls for greater democracy, demands that they concede have so far yielded meagre results.
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