“If 13 million voted for Mohamed Morsi during last June's presidential elections, there are tens of millions who are against him. Our mission is to make their voices heard,” said Mahmoud Badr, spokesman of the Tamarod campaign. Tamarod, or rebellion, is a petition launched last month to collect signatures to withdraw confidence from President Morsi and to call for holding early presidential elections. On Sunday, the campaign organisers announced in a press conference that they had collected over two million signatures from eight governorates in just 10 days. The campaign intends to collect 15 million signatures before 30 June, the day that marks Morsi's first year in office. At the press conference, Badr said the signatures proved the public had lost confidence in Morsi. In Cairo alone, he said, 800,000 signatures had been gathered, while another 10,000 had been garnered in the Suez governorate “If you are confident in your popularity, then hold early presidential elections,” Badr said. “We are challenging the Muslim Brotherhood to prove that they are popular. We will prove to them that people want to see them out of the presidential palace.” Campaign members also called on all opposition movements to stick to their initial decision to boycott the upcoming parliamentary elections in order to “show that the current Muslim Brotherhood regime has no legitimacy”. Campaign organisers emphasised that they will not ask the military to replace Morsi but are calling for a “democratic leader” to head the country. “Our campaign doesn't call for a military coup. We call on the people to turn against the president and withdraw their confidence from him as he reneged on the promise he made to protect the revolution,” said Hassan Shahin, the coordinator of Tamarod. Several political groups, topped by the National Salvation Front, the 6 April movement and the Revolutionary Socialists announced their support for Tamarod. Former presidential candidate Hamdeen Sabahi stated that “joining the Tamarod campaign is a revolutionary right.” After collecting the 15 million signatures, the campaign will hold a mass protest at the presidential palace to bring the attention of public opinion to “their achievement”, said Badr. However, as Tamarod collects more and more signatures the tension is growing between the campaign organisers and Muslim Brotherhood supporters. The media reported minor clashes between the two sides in Cairo, Suez, Sohag and Daqahliya. “People are protecting us from the thugs hired by the Muslim Brotherhood. This reminds us of thugs hired by Mubarak's former regime to harass the opposition before the revolution,” said Shahin. Responding to the campaign, Muslim Brotherhood officials questioned the legal basis of the campaign, arguing that it is against the law, according to their lawyer Abdel-Moneim Abdel-Maksoud. “Hijacking a political democratic legitimacy constitutes a violation of the law.” He stressed that Morsi was democratically chosen by the majority of Egyptians, saying that the signature is considered a sign of “political bankruptcy” on the part of Morsi's opposition. Abdel-Maksoud also argued that nothing in the constitution or in the law legalises any move to withdraw confidence from the highest executive authority in the country. The campaign organisers do not deny that a motion of public confidence withdrawn from Morsi has no legal basis and precedence but say the Muslim Brotherhood has broken the law many times since they took over power. “It is the president and his controversial constitutional decree that violated all legitimacy and constitutionality,” Shahin said. He added that the president also appointed a prosecutor-general and interfered in the internal affairs of the judiciary. Shahin was referring to Morsi's November 2012 constitutional decree which temporarily immunised the president's decisions from judicial challenge, shielded the Shura Council and dismissed Mubarak-appointed prosecutor-general Abdel Meguid Mahmoud and replaced him with current Prosecutor-General Talaat Ibrahim. Amr Al-Shobaki, of the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, said that the campaign lacks legal basis and only constitutes public pressure on the Islamist president. “Having 15 million signatures of no-confidence in the president would show to the domestic and international community the failure of the Muslim Brotherhood in ruling the country,” Al-Shobaki said. Writer and activist Nervana Mahmoud believes that the strength of Tamarod lies not just in its numbers, but also in the innovative approach its members use to oppose Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. “The campaign was also able to re-ignite the memory of the Egyptian revolution and can potentially challenge Morsi's legitimacy,” Mahmoud said. Tamarod is not the first attempt to challenge the rule of President Morsi. In February, a number of campaigns collecting signatures delegating the army to rule the country rather than the current regime sprung up around the country. The campaign was particularly successful in Port Said where citizens collected 13,600 signatures.
