Egypt's council of ministers is set to hold an emergency meeting to discuss teachers' and other strikes and to redraft parliamentary electoral law. The ruling military council sent the law back to the cabinet for redrafting Following Prime Minister Essam Sharaf's meeting with teacher syndicate representatives on Saturday, the Cabinet was called for an emergency meeting to be held on Sunday to discuss teachers' demands. The emergency meeting will also discuss doctors' demands and the electoral law referred back by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) on Saturday for redrafting. Three major strikes will be on the top of the list of issues to be discussed by Cabinet. These include the teachers' strike, the doctors' strike and the public transportation drivers' strike. The Cabinet will also be discussing parliamentary electoral law, with a view to taking into consideration the proposals made by Egypt's various political parties in a meeting with SCAF last week. Sources say the redrafted bill will maintain the combined list and individual candidacy system, but will change the ratio from 50-50, as in the previous bill, to two thirds for the list system and one third for individual candidates. The nation's political parties and movements had with few exceptions unanimously rejected the new electoral law introduced by the Cabinet and SCAF, demanding that all parliamentary seats be elected in accordance with the list system. They say the individual candidacy systems favours the network of power and money created by the former regime, and inbuilt into its defunct ruling party. This network, they argue furthermore, is still very much in place, while the former ruling party, dissolved by court order, has recreated itself in the form of 8 new political parties established since the revolution. The law demarcating the nation's constituency boundaries will have to be changed accordingly.
