Egypt's opposition-free parliament opens to a new session

The newly-elected People's Assembly opened its first session today, with deputies of the ruling NDP attacking the opposition's “parallel parliament”

The People's Assembly – the lower-house of Egypt's parliament – opened today for the first session of its five-year life. Today's procedural meeting witnessed the re-election of Ahmed Fathi Sorour as Speaker for the 21st consecutive time. Sorour was re-elected with nearly unanimous support, winning 505 votes out of a total of 506.
The Chairman of the Social Justice Party, Mohamed Abdel-Al, competed with Sorour for the Speaker's post but received just one vote.
Zeinab Radwan and Abdel-Aziz Mostafa were elected Deputy Speakers.
The increase in the number of Assembly's seats from 454 in the last parliament to 518 in the current one made the opening session challenging for many of the newly-elected deputies.
A large number of MPs, even some cabinet ministers, were unable to find seats. Female deputies, some of them pregnant, came early to make sure that they would find space to sit down.
Each MP was required to take an oath, swearing that “I vow to respect the state's constitution and laws and to serve the interests of the people completely.”
Today's procedural meeting was heavily dominated by the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP).
The number of NDP deputies stands at 420 (around 84 per cent), not including around 53 independents who were originally NDP members but contested the elections as independents. Most of these deputies sat on the left of the Assembly's podium, which in the previous parliament had been occupied by leftist and Muslim Brotherhood representatives.
Addressing the opening meeting, Speaker Sorour said that he had high hopes that the new Assembly will be a landmark in the 144-year-old history of the Egyptian parliament. He urged opposition MPs to carry out their role of serving the nation without violating either the rules of the constitution or the Assembly's internal regulations.
In Sorour's words, “As you all know, I have a lot of respect for the opposition, and a key part of my job is to give the floor toopposition deputies as many times as possible in order to deepen democratisation.”
At 3 per cent of the total, the number of opposition deputies in the newly-elected parliament stands at a markedly low level. Four of these opposition MPs belong to the leftist Tagammu party, while four smaller opposition parties received one seat each. The liberal-oriented Wafd party decided that the membership of its six MPs in the new parliament would be frozen and it would not be formally represented as a party in parliament, in response to what it called "blatant" rigging of the elections in favour of the NDP.
Ahmed Ezz, NDP's Secretary for Organisational Affairs, highly lauded the performance of the ruling party in the parliamentary elections. In Ezz's words, “the NDP secured a landslide success, winning the confidence and trust of the Egyptian people.” Opposition figures have, however, taken Ezz to task for what they call “election fraud, irregularities and manipulating the election in NDP's favour.”
Zakaria Azmi, NDP's Secretary for Administrative and Financial Affairs and Chief of Presidential Staff, strongly attacked the independent daily newspaper “Al-Masry Al-Youm”, accusing it of publishing abackpage cartoon which featured the newly-elected MPs as cats and dogs. Azmi asked Sorour to intervene and stand against those “who aim to tarnish the image of the nation's deputies.” In response, Sorour decided that the Assembly's Culture and Media Committee should discuss the issue and make a report about it. “We respect freedom of speech and we believe in free press but we believe that the press should not go too far by deliberately denigrating deputies,” Sorour said.
The Assembly's procedural session will be followed by deputies electing chairmen for 29 committees. A number of NDP business tycoons are expected to win the lion's share of the posts. NDP's Ezz will head the Budget Committee; Mohamed Abdel-Enein, an industrialist and a member of NDP's General Secretariat, will head the Industry Committee; Tarek Talaat Mostafa, a construction magnate, will head the Housing Committee.
As soon as the procedural session begun, MPs began to exercise their scrutinising role by tabling questions. In a question directed at Minister of Tourism Zoheir Garanah, NDP's Azmi wondered, “Is is true that Israel stands behind the proliferation of sharks in the Red Sea near Sharm El-Sheikh, with the objective of scaring foreign tourists away from Egypt?” Mohamed El-Sahafi, an NDP deputy representing the Upper Egypt governorate of Assuit, sharply attacked Minister of Health Hatem El-Gabaly for imposing high fees on citizens who want to receive medical treatment from government-owned hospitals after one o'clock in the afternoon. “El-Gabaly's order violates the constitution, which emphasises that citizens should receive free medical treatment from government hospitals,” El-Sahafi stated.
Meanwhile, NDP deputies sharply attacked the former MPs who announced last week that they would form a parallel parliament. Abdel-Ahad Gamaleddin, NDP's parliamentary spokesman, said that, “this so-called parallel parliament lacks legitimacy and is just a showy attempt by some opposition figures who lost in the election to regain their prestige in front of television channels and the electorate.” Hazem Hamadi, an NDP MP and a former police officer, said that “the idea of a parallel parliament was invented by a gathering of politically bankrupt opposition figures.” Speaker Sorour said, “Egypt's newly-elected parliament has won the confidence of the Egyptian people and this is why it is Egypt's legitimate parliament which respects the state's constitution and laws.”