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2000 marchers converge on Tahrir to protest Shafiq presidency bid Demonstrators march from Mohandeseen to Tahrir to protest Thursday's court ruling allowing Mubarak-era PM Ahmed Shafiq to contest Egypt's presidency
Some 2000 demonstrators on Friday evening marched from the Mostafa Mahmoud Mosque in Cairo's upscale Mohandeseen district to downtown's Tahrir Square to protest a High Constitutional Court (HCC) ruling allowing Mubarak-era PM Ahmed Shafiq to contest Egypt's presidency. The April 6 Youth Movement and the Revolutionary Socialists were among the political forces that took part in Friday's march, which was briefly led by renowned labour activist Kamal Khalil. Prominent activist Salam Saeed also took part in the march, along with Mohamed Abdel-Qodous, a Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated member of the Egyptian Journalists Syndicate. According to Ahram Online's correspondent at the scene, some marchers defaced campaign posters bearing images of Shafiq, who will take on Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Mursi in a hotly-contested presidential runoff vote slated for Saturday and Sunday. On Mohandeseen's central Batal Ahmed Abdel-Aziz Street, the slow-moving march halted traffic for a while. Some protesters distributed flyers to passers-by reading, "There's no turning back [to the Mubarak regime]." Despite the arrival of the marchers to Tahrir, however, protester numbers in the flashpoint square remained unexpectedly low as of late Friday evening. The march was organised one day after Egypt's HCC declared a Political Disenfranchisement Law – aimed at barring Mubarak-era officials from holding high government office – to be unconstitutional. If applied, the law would have disqualified Shafiq from the presidential race. What's more, the Islamist-led People's Assembly (the lower house of Egypt's parliament), which had endorsed the disenfranchisement law in April, was dissolved on Thursday after the HCC ruled that Egypt's Parliamentary Elections Law – which regulated last year's legislative polls – was declared similarly unconstitutional.
