Mona El-Nahhas watches the Ghad Party power struggle become ever more ferocious The Ghad Party's woes continued this week, as a group of party insiders held an emergency general assembly on Saturday, during which they voted for the dismissal of party chairman Ayman Nour, and elected Moussa Mustafa Moussa, the party's former deputy chairman, as their new leader. The dissidents, estimated at nearly 1200 party members (according to figures announced by the meeting's organisers), also froze the memberships of six leading figures, including Nour's wife -- TV announcer Gamila Ismail -- for 90 days. The dissidents accused Nour of paving the way for his wife to become the party's secretary-general, a post that Ragab Helal Hemeida, one of the dissidents, had been aiming to occupy. "Nour is a dictator who should not be leading a liberal party like the Ghad," said Moussa. The dissidents submitted a formal notice regarding their meeting's conclusions to the semi- governmental Political Parties Committee. On Sunday, Nour himself held a press conference at the party's downtown headquarters. He described the dissidents' meeting as illegitimate, and declared himself the party's sole and rightful leader. Nour also accused the state of being behind the dissidents' ploy. He told the press conference that most of those who took part in the dissidents' meeting were actually employees of a company owned by a member of the ruling National Democratic Party's (NDP) Policies Committee. To prove his point, Nour introduced a gentleman by the name of Mohamed El-Awadi, a computer technician who said that he and some 50 of his colleagues were brought to the Ghad dissidents' meeting, and told to pretend that they were party delegates. "These people had nothing to do with the Ghad Party," an angry Nour said. "This was not a party's general assembly. This was political skullduggery." Just three weeks ago, after Nour placed second to President Mubarak in the nation's first- ever multi-candidate presidential elections, there was much talk about the possibility of the year-old Ghad Party leading the opposition. Today, that scenario seems unlikely, with the Ghad mired in a seemingly endless stream of inter-party disputes. The non-stop friction, after all, is sure to negatively affect the party's performance in the coming parliamentary polls. In fact, the power struggle over the party's chairmanship was one of the main reasons why the Ghad was excluded from a recently-formed opposition front. Some have compared the party's problems to the crisis that eventually froze the Labour and other Egyptian opposition parties. Whether or not the state will take advantage of the internal chaos to freeze the Ghad Party, as it did with the Islamist-oriented Labour Party, remains unclear however. At Sunday's press conference, Nour said, "they might not want to freeze the party, but they certainly want to weaken it, via their agents, in order to obstruct the party's electoral campaign." Earlier, Nour had announced that the Ghad Party would be fielding candidates in every single one of Egypt's estimated 222 constituencies. He also said that the party would welcome would-be NDP candidates who had failed to win their party's backing for parliamentary nominations. "That's why they are trying to destroy the party -- to intimidate those who are considering joining us," Nour said on Sunday. If the Political Parties Committee ended up acknowledging Moussa as the Ghad Party chairman, Nour said, he would declare himself Egypt's president. The Ghad power struggle began nearly a month ago, when the party's council of sages dismissed four leading members -- Moussa, Hemeida, Ibrahim Saleh, and Mursi El-Sheikh -- for committing violations. The four dismissed members then submitted a memorandum to the Political Parties Committee asking for Nour's dismissal. The committee declined to take sides, leaving it to the party's leaders to settle the issue themselves. Nour then called an emergency general assembly, during which party members unanimously renewed their confidence in him. If anything, that move only appeared to further catalyse the anti-Nour camp's efforts.
