Shura turnaround

Safwat El-Sherif, information minister for the past 22 years and ruling party strong man, is to be voted Shura Council speaker today. Gamal Essam El-Din reports

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The Shura Council, parliament's consultative upper house, will meet today to elect a new speaker and two deputies. The election follows three stages of mid-term balloting that filled 88 council seats. The session will also feature the swearing-in of new members and the election of chairmen for 10 committees.

While he is in Germany receiving medical treatment, President Hosni Mubarak, who is also chairman of the National Democratic Party (NDP), deputised Prime Minister Atef Ebeid to meet with the ruling party's newly-elected and appointed Shura Council members to nominate the speaker and deputies, and provide them with guidelines on a number of domestic and foreign issues.

During that meeting, which took place yesterday, NDP Secretary-General Safwat El-Sherif was nominated to replace Mustafa Kamal Helmi as Shura Council chairman. Helmi has held the post for the past 15 years. El-Sherif's nomination was hailed by the opposition as a preliminary step towards the dismantling of the NDP's old guard, the other members of which include Agriculture Minister Youssef Wali, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kamal El-Shazli and Parliamentary Speaker Fathi Sorour.

The NDP won 70 of the 88 Shura Council seats being contested over the past few weeks. Seventeen of the remaining 18 seats went to so-called NDP-independents (who are basically NDP members who decided to run independently after the party declined to nominate them), with the remaining seat won by the leftist Tagammu Party's Abdel-Rahman Kheir.

Kheir was the first opposition candidate in the Shura Council's 23-year history to garner a seat via elections. He won in a run-off for South Cairo's Misr Al-Qadima (Old Cairo) district seat. Kheir's victory, combined with the fact that most of the official NDP candidates in Cairo lost, prompted the ruling party's leadership to claim that the elections reflected unfettered democracy. According to El- Shazli, "this demonstrates that the people were free to elect the candidates they preferred, and we in the NDP respect the people's choices."

The opposition, however, saw the Shura poll as another "setback for democracy in Egypt". The opposition parties, which for the most part boycotted the election, said they refused to join a battle in which NDP members were vying against each other. With the opposition choosing not to differentiate between NDP-independents and official NDP candidates, "the NDP has won nearly 100 per cent of the Shura seats," said Wafd Party Chairman Noman Gomaa.

Interior Ministry statistics revealed that voter turnout was at an unprecedented low, ranging between three to five per cent.

The names of the 44 council members appointed by Mubarak, meanwhile, were announced on Tuesday, bringing the total number of newly- elected and appointed members to 132, or half of the council's total membership. The appointees included 17 new members and featured eight Coptic Christians and 12 women.

Six of the appointees are from the NDP's influential Policy Secretariat, which is headed by Gamal Mubarak, the president's 41-year-old son. Most prominent among these are Mohamed Kamal, chairman of the Secretariat's Youth Committee, Maged El-Sherbini, chairman of the NDP's Youth Secretariat, Magi El-Halwani, dean of Cairo University's Faculty of Mass Communication, Salwa Shaarawi Gomaa, a Cairo University economics professor, and Manal Hussein, an assistant to the foreign trade minister.

The list also included Nagui El-Shehabi, chairman of the Islamist-oriented Al-Geel (Generation) opposition party.

There were several surprises vis-ˆ-vis the council members whose terms were not extended by the president. These included Ibrahim Se'da, editor-in-chief and board chairman of Akhbar Al- Youm, and prominent journalist Anis Mansour, both of whom had been Shura members since its inception in 1980. Former ministers Ismail Sallam (health), Fouad Abu Zaghla (industry), and Abdel-Sallam Abdel-Ghaffar (education), as well as businessman and construction magnate Roshdi El- Sharqawi, American University in Cairo economics professors Adel Beshai and Heba Handoussa, tourism magnate Raouf Ghali (father of Foreign Trade Minister Youssef Ghali), actress Madiha Youssri, prominent journalist Sekina Fouad, and economists Souad Rizq and Soheir Gilbana, also lost their seats.

The 264-member council is now made up of 257 NDP members and seven figures from the opposition (six appointed and one elected).

Today's procedural session will also include the approval of amendments to three laws on commerce, postage fees, and the regulation of police and military academies. The council will also meet on Saturday to approve new amendments to the nationality law that give Egyptian nationality to children of Egyptian mothers married to foreign husbands. These amendments will then go to the People's Assembly for approval.

Both houses will adjourn for summer recess next Sunday.