A year into his fifth term, questions abound about the scope and timing of the president's plans for political reform. Gamal Essam El-Din reports The first year of President Hosni Mubarak's fifth term proved that much still needs to be done before a fully fledged political reform process begins to take shape. That much the government itself admits. Urging a wait and see approach, the regime says the process will really begin to bear fruit this year. The opposition, on the other hand, feels the events of the first year were ample enough to prove that there is little seriousness in reform at all. Meanwhile, independent observers said that those who had placed stock in the campaign promises made by Mubarak as he easily won his fifth-term as president exactly a year ago, will have to wait a while before deciding whether they were being too optimistic. Ever since Mubarak proposed -- in February 2005 -- to amend the constitution to allow multi-candidate presidential elections for the first time, his mantra has been voiced in an election programme claiming to reflect a genuine commitment for democratisation rather than just a tactical bowing to American pressure for reform. Today, in the eyes of some, that democratic tide appears to have turned. The opposition, especially, firmly believes that the regime has backtracked on its promises. "Mubarak's programme," said Diaaeddin Dawoud, chairman of the opposition Arab Nasserist Party, "was just a response to external pressure, especially from America. This was evident in his sketchy programme which lacked any serious details." This vagueness, he argued, was deliberate in order to allow enough room for backtracking later, or for tailoring the alleged reforms to his own tastes. The president's campaign platform included promises to abolish the Emergency Law in favor of an anti-terror law. Curtailing the powers of the president of the republic in favour of the cabinet and the People's Assembly, scrapping the existing individual candidacy system in favour of a new slate system, and allocating a certain quota of seats for women in parliament were also amongst its more salient points. In the months leading up to the 2005 presidential election, said Amr Hamzawy, a senior associate at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the regime came under severe pressure from external and internal forces. As a result, it raced to draft a programme that was glamourous in form, but hollow in content -- mere "lip service," in Hamzawy's view. "It reflected a confused response to external pressure more than a genuine belief in political reform." Accordingly, what resulted over the last year was a shift back to what Hamzawy called the "authoritarian-style government that has been in place since Mubarak's predecessor, President Anwar El-Sadat, was assassinated in 1981." In fact, soon after the president's re-election, the government had matters more important than reform to attend to. During the subsequent parliamentary elections for example, after the Muslim Brotherhood clinched an unexpectedly large number of seats (34) in the first stage, the government intervened during the remaining two stages to better craft their results. A report by the National Campaign for Monitoring Parliamentary Elections (NCMPE) confirmed that the regime was not serious about reform. "The ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) did everything possible and impossible to rig the election," the report noted, "going to the extent of beating judges and blocking citizens from voting, in full view of local and international media." Once the parliamentary elections were through, Ghad Party leader Ayman Nour -- the candidate who came a distant second to Mubarak in the presidential elections -- was sentenced to five years in jail. Nour's incarceration sparked criticism, especially in the US. In fact, the NCMPE report argued that rigging the parliamentary elections and jailing Nour pushed the US Congress into exerting pressure on the Bush administration to not approve a free trade agreement with Egypt, and even cut its annual aid package to Cairo by $200 million. Congress, said the report, was "shocked" by the Egyptian government's backtracking on reform. The administration chose not to recommend cutting the aid, arguing that to do so was not a good pressure tool; at the same time, it promised to urge Mubarak to move forward on the reform track. And yet, in February and March of this year, the government adopted two more anti-reform measures: the first was its delaying of local council elections to 2008; the second provided Mubarak with a new, three-year mandate to fully manage all military allocations. In the meantime, Gamal Mubarak, the president's 43-year-old son and the chairman of the ruling party's influential Policies Secretariat, was promoted to the NDP's assistant secretary position. Other business tycoons close to the younger Mubarak were also promoted, while several reform-minded party members -- such as Osama El-Ghazali Harb -- opted to resign. The changes brewing at the NDP were seen by most opposition parties as a major step towards Gamal Mubarak being groomed for the presidency. In April, the government rammed yet another two-year extension of the Emergency Law through parliament -- ostensibly in response to a series of bombings in Sinai. According to Hamzawy, this provided the regime with the legal justification it needed to control political dissent and carry out a series of subsequent crackdowns on its opponents' camps. In May and June, faced with a spate of street demonstrations driven by reformist judges, journalists and peaceful political activists, the regime ended up arresting more than 600 people. Meanwhile, two Washington-based institutes that promote democracy were banned from working in the country, and two laws enshrining executive authority over the judiciary and the press were hastily passed by parliament. Despite all this, NDP leaders do not see the political events of last year as a setback for Mubarak's election programme. In fact, Moufid Shehab, the minister of state for parliamentary and legal affairs, claimed that "the details of Mubarak's political reform programme are still being worked out," and that the plan would be "implemented within six years and not just one year". Shehab also said Mubarak was currently "studying" constitutional amendments proposed by MPs. Next year, Shehab said, will be "a year of historic constitutional reforms". These will include the president devolving many of his powers to parliament and the cabinet. "The People's Assembly will enjoy greater supervisory powers over the government, while the president will be obligated to seek the opinion of the prime minister before embarking upon national security decisions," Shehab said. Other reforms, he added, will be US-inspired. "Local governorates will be transformed into a US-like federal system with local city councils enjoying greater powers, while the new anti-terror law will be more like the US Patriot Act."
