Last week, the Political Parties Affairs Committee declined to give licences to the Masr Al-Orouba Party, founded by former military chief of staff Sami Anan and the Tamarod Movement, which called for mass protests in June 2013 against Muslim Brotherhood rule, leading to the ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi. The Committee cited several provisions in the political parties law as the reason behind its decision. According to the Committee there were legal technicalities that had not been met in the application forms presented by both parties' officials. In line with the political parties law, head of the Committee Anwar Al-Gabri referred the papers of the two would-be parties to the Higher Administrative Court for a final say on the issue. The Political Parties Affairs Committee has the right to approve or reject the formation of parties according to the constitution and the political parties law. Applications are rejected if the documents required to form a party are either incomplete or forged. In line with the 2014 constitution, parties based on religious, racial or military platforms are banned in Egypt. News reports quoted Anan as saying that his party's rejection had been for administrative reasons related to its headquarters that would be solved within the next few days and not for legal reasons. Tamarod issued a statement saying that the movement's papers were rejected due to a problem in its governing structure. It had proposed a party without a leader or a central leadership, but the committee had asked it to name a leader. Instead of seeking to amend the structure, a simple step, the movement decided to demand an amendment to the law in a way that would allow a party without a chairman to be licensed. The movement acknowledged that such an amendment would take time, which would not be in its interest. Last April, movement co-founder Mahmoud Badr announced that it was going to turn into a political party with the aim of participating in the upcoming parliamentary elections, scheduled to be held in early 2015. The parliamentary elections are the third pillar of the roadmap declared by the interim government following Morsi's ouster in July 2013 and after the constitutional referendum and the presidential elections were held. Realising the risk if they did not move quickly, Tamarod forwarded the name of its Secretary-General Mahmoud Badr to the committee, “a step which caused intra-Tamarod conflict,” member Mohamed Nabawi said. It isn't the first time for the Tamarod Movement to suffer from internal splits. In February, the youth movement was threatened with division when some of its senior members hurried to show their support for Nasserist leader Hamdeen Sabahi when he revealed his intention to run in the 2014 presidential polls. Another part of the movement's leadership had already decided to back Al-Sisi. Though Anan's party shares the same destiny as Tamarod, being rejected by the committee, the two parties are different in their ideological and political orientations. Tamparod even targeted Anan with fierce criticism when he earlier announced his intention to take part in the presidential race. Anan, chief of staff from 2005 under ousted former president Hosni Mubarak until 2012, retired following an unsuccessful assassination attempt in March 2014. Tamarod Movement leaders have accused Anan of being “the engineer of a deal to bring Morsi [the former president] to the presidential palace, even though it was Ahmed Shafik [a former presidential hopeful] who actually won the elections.”
