In an attempt to contain the one-month-long dispute within the liberal Wafd Party, President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi on 13 May met Wafd Party Chairman Al-Sayed Al-Badawi along with the eight leading Wafdists whose membership in the board had been suspended. In addition to leading Wafdist Fouad Badrawi, the eight include Essam Shiha, Yassin Tageddin, Mustafa Raslan, Abdel-Aziz Al-Nahas, Sherif Taher, Ahmed Younis and Mohamed Al-Messeiri Ten members of the 60-member board are appointed by the party chairman by means of the Wafd's internal statutes. After the meeting with the president, which came only two days before the party's board elections, which were held on Friday, signals indicated a solution to the crisis was near. “The president… is keen on keeping the Wafd a strong political body, and he has ended the ongoing conflict between the members,” the presidency said in a statement. “The presidency believes that the political arena cannot afford conflicts before the parliamentary elections,” the statement added. Following the presidential meeting, Al-Badawi, a businessman who was elected party chairman in 2010 and saw the renewal of his mandate in 2014, said that the party's newly-elected board would hold its first meeting on 19 May to discuss the fate of the eight suspended members. Al-Badawi added that the members “are welcome again in the party”. “We agreed with Al-Sisi's suggestion to appoint a few of the eight dissenting members within the high board,” Al-Badawi noted. Actually, on Tuesday afternoon and during the 19 May meeting, it was decided that five of the eight suspended members would be appointed at the party high board. The appointed members are Badrawi, Tageddin, Taher, Shiha and Raslan. Such a step is viewed as being the key element behind reconciliation. Wafd's rift began when the eight board members held a meeting in Sharqiya on 1 May during which 1,200 party members announced they no longer had confidence in Al-Badawi. Under party rules a no-confidence motion supported by 500 members triggers immediate action. Immediately following the Sharqiya meeting Al-Badawi called for an emergency session of the Wafd Party's high board at which the party chairman's supporters voted to suspend the membership of their eight colleagues and refer them to a disciplinary committee. A day prior to the elections, Badrawi, who ran against Al-Badawi for the party chairmanship in 2014 and lost by only 200 votes, criticised Al-Badawi for not exerting enough efforts to solve the problems within party ranks. In a press statement, Badrawi announced that he and other members of the reform faction, including 24 members, would boycott the Friday board elections. The eight suspended members did not cast ballots on Friday, however, hundreds of Wafd Party members headed to the party headquarters in Dokki to vote, resulting in a 50-member high board. “The crisis is on its way to reaching an end,” Shiha, the legal advisor of the Wafd Party and one of the dissident board members, told the Al-Ahram Weekly on Monday. “We have reached an agreement and it's just a matter of time before an announcement on reconciliation is made,” said Shiha, who in an earlier interview with the Weekly accused Al-Badawi of misusing his power as party leader, giving himself absolute authority over party decisions “as if he were running one of his companies”. The Wafd is the oldest political party in Egypt, established in 1918 as a mass movement to support the Egyptian delegation at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference after World War I. The delegation demanded the country's right to self-determination and freedom from British occupation. The party played an important role from 1923-1952 and regained legal status in 1978 after re-emerging from the old Wafd Party. In the parliamentary elections of 2012, the party won 9.2 per cent of the vote, with 38 seats in the 508-seat parliament. Egypt has not had a parliament since 2012. Parliamentary elections, initially scheduled for March and April this year, have been indefinitely postponed until electoral laws are redrafted after the High Constitutional Court declared them to be unconstitutional. The dispute has overtones of April 2006 when the then Wafd leader Noaman Gomaa sacked his second-in-command, Mounir Fakhri Abdel-Nour, now minister of industry and trade. When Abdel-Nour and his supporters began calling for a change in leadership, the party's Political Bureau dismissed Gomaa and appointed Mahmoud Abaza as interim leader. A legal battle ensued, with Gomaa filing a complaint with the prosecutor-general against his “illegitimate sacking”, arguing only the party's General Assembly had the authority to dismiss him. The General Assembly sacked Gomaa and appointed Mustafa Al-Tawil as interim leader. In one of the more bizarre developments of the 2006 dispute, Gomaa and his supporters broke into the Wafd Party's headquarters and opened fire on their rivals. Gomaa was arrested in the aftermath of the incident which left 23 people injured and parts of the party's headquarters destroyed by fire.
