The week began with an unheeded call for a general strike and ended with promised steps to transfer power to an elected civilian authority, Dina Ezzat reports The response to calls for a general strike last Saturday, followed by a campaign of civil disobedience, was limited to groups of students and a few labour unions while the majority went about their business as usual. On a different track Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) met Tuesday with parliamentary speaker Saad El-Katatni, a number of heads of parliamentary committees and deputies to discuss how to proceed with the transitional period through drafting a new constitution and electing a new president, paving the way for the transfer of power to an elected civilian authority. SCAF's seriousness of intent was reflected in the announcement on Tuesday by Mohamed Ateya, minister of parliamentary affairs, who said presidential elections will be held by the end of May, thus advancing the original timetable by one month. Presidency candidates will submit their credentials on 10 March for the next three weeks. The contenders then have 45 days in which to campaign. The flurry of activity at week's end was a far cry from its start which saw a civil disobedience campaign fizzle out. "Maybe the call was not taken up because people have so many economic and security concerns. But this does not mean that another call for a strike or civil disobedience will not pick up another further down the road," says Dina Shehata, a senior researcher at Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies. Shehata, who has done much work on revolutionary forces, says the humble show of public solidarity with the strike call is unlikely to dissuade those forces from abandoning their protest techniques. "From day one of the 25 January Revolution the public's sympathy with demonstrations has fluctuated. Beyond the 18 days of the revolution there have been considerable ups and downs," she argued. According to Shehata, the key demand of revolutionaries now is a speedier transfer of power and the establishing of mechanisms that will allow the new constitution to be drafted without the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) exercising any influence on its content. They are calls that have failed to reverberate among Egypt's most powerful political groups. Both Coptic and Muslim religious leaders lent their voices to the appeal to ignore the civil disobedience campaign and the Islamist parliamentary majority offered no support for the call. "I am opposed to civil disobedience at a time Egypt is facing difficult economic challenges. We need to honour the demands of the revolution but we must do this through the elected parliament," said Ashraf Thabet, deputy speaker of the People's Assembly and a leading member of the Salafist Nour Party. Thabet does not accept the argument there is a deep and growing divide between parliament and political forces that represent the revolution. Unlike many revolutionary figures, Thabet is not concerned that writing the constitution while SCAF is in office means that constitution will be stamped with SCAF's own interests. Nor does he believe tweaking the date of presidential elections is important. "Early May, mid-May, late-June. It is a matter of weeks here or there," he says. Purging the Ministry of Interior of counter-revolutionary forces, another key demand of activists, is not, Thabet argues "a mission that can be done overnight or in a few weeks". Sources close to SCAF and the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood told Al-Ahram Weekly that intensive consultations are underway between the two sides to secure agreement on two issues. One concerns the future of the weeks-old government of Kamal El-Ganzouri. Should it remain in office or be replaced by a coalition government led by the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party? The Muslim Brotherhood, say sources, is most likely to accommodate SCAF's demand that El-Ganzouri remain in office until the election of a new president. The second substantive focus of SCAF-Brotherhood consultations is the new constitution. The Freedom and Justice Party is busy preparing a draft based on the text of the 1971 constitution. As for the next president, sources agree neither SCAF nor the Brotherhood fully favours any of the current candidates. Salafi candidate Hazem Abu Ismail is rejected by both sides as too extremist, Amr Moussa as too proud and Abul-Fotouh, who broke away from Brotherhood ranks to stand, has no hope of securing the support of parliament's largest block, the FJP. Islamist candidate Selim El-Awwa is more acceptable to the Brotherhood than SCAF. The generals might be inclined to support Ahmed Shafik but remain hesitant to publicly back the last prime minister appointed by Hosni Mubarak who had to quit office in the face of public protests. "I think both sides are searching for a new candidate and are busy discussing their options," says political scientist Amr Hashem Rabie. Both the influence and legitimacy of SCAF, says Rabie, are being eroded in the face of the newly elected parliament and by the military's poor management of the transitional phase. But, argues Rabie, the Muslim Brotherhood is positioning itself to share the parliamentary legitimacy it acquired courtesy of its political wing, the FJP, winning the largest number of assembly seats, with the military council, providing it can reach agreement with SCAF on the contents of the new constitutional and on a presidential candidate. While the Brotherhood and SCAF are engaged in negotiations and at times confrontation, public opinion and revolutionary forces are keeping an eye on the political process and seem ready to intervene should the moment arise. The Karama Party MP Amin Iskandar, however, warns that it is too early to discount the impact of public protests on either SCAF or the Brotherhood. "Nobody should underestimate public frustration with the control counter-revolutionary forces exercise across state institutions," he says. "We are still in the middle of a tough game."
