Who's watching?

By Salama A Salama

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Following on the footsteps of Karen Hughes and Liz Cheney, the French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy came to Egypt to talk our officials into allowing international observers to monitor November's parliamentary elections. We expect US and European efforts to continue, and may anyone else interested in spreading democracy feel free to speak up, so long as the aim is to introduce international monitoring of sorts in the coming elections.

Should international efforts succeed where national efforts have failed, that would be proof that political reform in this country cannot proceed without strenuous efforts both at home and abroad. The National Democratic Party (NDP) is promising in earnest that the elections will be fair and that the NDP does not want the opposition to disappear from the scene. But political rights are not something you get by pledges and good intentions alone. We need laws, guarantees and conduct that lead to a true change in political life that allows all political forces to interact on equal footing.

At best, the political breakthrough the NDP is talking about will not materialise until the 2011 elections. Until then, we will have only promises, and promises can be twisted -- just as happened with Article 76 -- once the ruling party gets the landslide victory it hopes for. Demands for political and constitutional reform will remain on hold till after the elections, till after a new People's Assembly looks into the proposed laws and changes. And one cannot rule out that we would end up with a People's Assembly that differs little from the past one, the one that played havoc with Article 76.

The reason I am not optimistic is simple. The upcoming elections would be conducted on a winner-takes-all rather than proportional basis as we had hoped. The NDP said it does not have the time to change the system, although President Hosni Mubarak had promised to change the political system in a way that gives the opposition more say. Much has been said about the voters' lists and the need to update and computerise them. So far nothing has been done to avert the irregularities noted by the judges and the National Council for Human Rights. Everything is still the same, although the candidates will be announcing their standing within days.

In the presidential elections, we all knew that the NDP is running virtually unchallenged. In the parliamentary elections, things are different. The competition will be tough and all parties are preparing for a battle. The NDP is counting on businessmen support and hoping to score a landslide victory to prove that it has the upper hand. Faces will change and the rhetoric will be repackaged, but the scene is likely to stay the same. The NDP will continue trying to break up the Ghad Party. It will continue trying to undermine the opposition's bid for a united front. It will keep trying to use the Muslim Brotherhood as a bogeyman, to dissuade the public from backing the opposition.

The challenge facing the opposition will be tougher than ever. And unless the opposition acts promptly and agree on a united front, with or without the Brotherhood, the opposition would be facing a definite setback.