Wafd on the skids
Last week, Mahmoud El-Shazli became the fourth Wafdist MP to quit the party in just two years. Gamal Essam El-Din reports
On 3 May, Wafdist MP Mahmoud El-Shazli surprised his colleagues at the People's Assembly with an announcement: he should no longer be considered a Wafdist because he had decided to resign from the party's ranks.
Wafd Party chairman Noaman Gomaa saw things differently. In a 5 May letter to Assembly Speaker Fathy Sorour, Gomaa insisted that El-Shazli had actually been expelled, not only from the party's ranks, but also from its mouthpiece newspaper, Al-Wafd, where he has worked as a journalist for the past 15 years.
El-Shazli's departure from the centrist party is the latest in a series of high-profile dismissals that began soon after Gomaa took over the party's leadership in late 2000. In March 2001, Gomaa dismissed two of the party's parliamentary deputies, Ayman Nour and Mohamed Farid Hassanein, accusing them of attempting to topple him from his then five-month-old chairmanship of the party. A year later, Gomaa also fired Seif Mahmoud, another Wafdist MP, charging him with exploiting his parliamentary membership to pursue personal interests.
Thanks to a January 2003 by-election in Damanhour that replaced a Muslim Brotherhood MP with Wafdist Khairi Illig, the latest departure brings the number of Wafdist parliamentarians to a meagre four, down from the seven who were elected in 2000. In fact, it was the circumstances surrounding that by-election which played a major part in the internal conflict within the party itself.
According to Mohamed Abdel-Alim, one of the remaining four Wafdist MPs, Gomaa is "an autocratic leader of a liberal-oriented party." Abdel-Alim and another of the remaining Wafdist MPs, Fouad Badrawi, are not on good terms with Gomaa, who has ordered the party's paper to refrain from covering their parliamentary activities. Badrawi, the grandson of the party's former leader, Fouad Serrageddin, has also accused Gomaa of authoritarianism, and claimed he rigged the results of his election as party chairman.
The relationship between Gomaa, on the one hand, and El-Shazli and Abdel-Alim on the other began deteriorating in December 2002, when both MPs went against the party's decision to vote in favour of stripping prominent Muslim Brother Gamal Heshmat of his parliamentary membership.
The assembly was complying with a Court of Cassation report that said a vote-counting error had stripped Khairi Illig, a Wafd Party candidate, of the right to compete against Heshmat in Damanhour in the 2000 parliamentary elections. The subsequent by-election between Heshmat and Illig held last January was marked by heavy security forces intervention meant to ensure an Illig victory.
El-Shazli and Abdel-Alim said it was disgraceful for a party claiming to be Egypt's historical beacon of liberal democracy to both approve the stripping of Heshmat's membership, and accept a rigged election just to get their party's man into parliament. "It was clear from the very beginning," explained Abdel- Alim, "that the idea of stripping Heshmat's parliamentary membership was masterminded by the NDP to intimidate Muslim Brotherhood MPs from actively participating in politics and directing embarrassing questions at cabinet members."
At the time, Abdel-Alim and El-Shazli also spread rumours that their colleague -- prominent businessman and leading Wafdist Mounir Fakhri Abdel-Nour -- sent employees from his factory to Damanhour to illegally vote for Illig. Infuriated by such claims, Gomaa ordered the party's paper to stop featuring any news items about the two MPs. He also instigated disciplinary action against both men on charges of misconduct.
El-Shazli accused Gomaa and Abdel-Nour of adopting a policy of "detente" with the government with an aim towards "gaining a larger number of seats in the next parliamentary elections". According to Abdel- Alim, "this clearly goes against what most Wafdist members want, which is to expose the failings of Egypt's authoritarian regime and advocate liberal democracy as the best alternative."
El-Shazli said his resignation is especially significant "because it shows that the chairman of a party which claims to be liberal does not know how to tolerate opposing opinions". El-Shazli said his resignation must be seen as a clear signal that opposition parties are not very different from the NDP. "All are manipulated by autocratic figures to serve personal interests," he said.
The other ex-Wafdists -- Nour, Hassanein and Mahmoud -- warmly welcomed El-Shazli's resignation, welcoming him to the ranks of the "independent MPs".
Assembly Speaker Sorour, meanwhile, was not as pleased by the turn of events, arguing that "the increase in the number of independent MPs is a blow to the multi-party system. I hope independent MPs will join parties in order to reinvigorate political life," Sorour told the independent MPs. Nour responded by saying that the platforms promoted by existing political parties were not encouraging enough to attract independent MPs. "The political system must be entirely restructured to reinvigorate political parties and democracy," he said.
El-Shazli, meanwhile, has decided to fight his expulsion from the party's newspaper by filing a complaint with the Press Syndicate. He also threatened to hold a sit-in at the assembly's Pharaonic Hall, but Sorour quickly ordered the assembly's security personnel not to allow MPs to use the hall for such purposes.
Gomaa has also been at loggerheads with other leading party members, firing Al-Wafd's two leading editors, Said Abdel-Khaleq and Magdi Mehanna. Observers have described the state of the party since Gomaa took over as regrettable, especially in light of the fact that Al-Wafd is Egypt's largest legal opposition party, and the country's oldest surviving political party.
