Mass resignations from Salafist Nour Party

One hundred and fifty leading members withdrawal from Salafist Nour Party, following the alleged resignation of party leader Emad Abdel-Ghafour

The ongoing dispute in Egypt's Salafist Nour Party continued for the second day in a row with 150 members publicly resigning.
On Tuesday evening, ex-members from the Nour Party issued a statement announcing the mass resignation of leading members from 23 Egyptian governorates.
Mohamed Nour, the resigned and former spokesperson of the Nour Party, stated in a media statement that he and other ex-leading figures from the political party decided to resign quietly, wishing the coalition all the best.
He added in his statement that the reasons behind these resignations had to do with the fact that they had a different political vision for the policies adopted by the Nour Party lately.
“We decided to have our own political group that opens its doors to any Egyptian who wants to work under the Islamic Sharia umbrella,” Nour said without any further details about the new party.
The resigned leading members in governorates include several members of Shura Council and several former MPs.
Mohamed Nour also claimed that the leader of the Nour Party Emad Abdel-Ghafour has not resigned; in contrast to what the other former spokesperson of the Nour Party Yosri Hamad said in exclusive statements to Al-Ahram Arabic news website, announcing the alleged resignation of Emad Abdel-Ghafour on Tuesday.
Despite expectations from observers and Hazem Salah Abu-Ismail supporters to attract many of those resigned leading members and figures from Nour Party to Abu Ismail's political party, soon to be declared, both Nour and Hamad denied that the former Nour members would join the new coalition.
Nadar Bakkar, the official spokesperson of Nour Party, underestimated the resignations of the 150 members. “The Party was not affected by these resignations; we already wish them luck wherever they will go,” Bakkar told Ahram Online.
Last Tuesday night, the Nour Party's committee in the governorates issued a statement asserting that the resigned members were not leading figures but rather “regular members.”
The current wave of resignations from the Salafist Nour Party already comes after several months of truce between what is known to be Emad Abdel-Ghafour's front and Yasser El-Borhamy's coalition.
In September, the Nour Party's supreme committee “backed by Yasser El-Borhamy” announced that it had withdrawn confidence from party chairman Emad Abdel-Ghafour, replacing him with El-Sayid Mostafa Hussein Khalifa. Abdel-Ghafour, for his part, reportedly retaliated by calling for the dismissal of supreme committee members.
The truce was found between the two fronts saving the party from a spilt when the Shura Council of Salafist Call interfered.
The Nour Party has been considered the second Islamist party represented in the parliament as well as the most influential Salafist party from the size of membership in Egypt.
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