Egypt's National Election Authority (NEA) published Wednesday an initial list of presidential candidates who have submitted their candidacy documents, along with the numbers of endorsements they received, in the state-owned Al-Ahram and Al-Akhbar newspapers. According to a statement published as an ad on the front pages of Al-Ahram and Al-Akhbar, the initial list of presidential candidates are Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi and Moussa Mostafa Moussa. The statement revealed that incumbent President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi got endorsements from 549 MPs in the House of Representatives and 161,707 citizens from across the country, while Al-Ghad Party leader Moussa Ahmed Moussa got endorsements from 20 MPs. According to the Egyptian Constitution, as well as the presidential elections law, presidential hopefuls must submit at least 25,000 endorsements from citizens across 15 governorates, or 20 endorsements from members of parliament, to qualify as candidates. On Monday, the official presidential elections campaign of El-Sisi announced at a press conference it had presented 173,000 citizen endorsements for El-Sisi's candidacy. At a press conference held on the same day, Al-Ghad Party leader Moussa Mostafa Moussa said that he presented to the NEA his candidacy documents including 47,000 citizen endorsements and 26 endorsements from members of parliament. Elections are scheduled for March. President El-Sisi, whose current term will end in June, won the 2014 presidential elections in a two-man race with nearly 97 percent of the vote.
