What will the ruling party do to recover the ground it has lost to the Muslim Brothers, asks Omayma Abdel-Latif As the country braces itself for Saturday's run-off polls in the second stage of the parliamentary elections, the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) is struggling to come to terms with its poor showing in the elections so far. Half-way through the parliamentary poll the picture emerging is of a party that has lost a great deal of ground, as well as direction, in the face of a strong Muslim Brotherhood (MB) challenge. Then there is the question of turnout, with some 75 per cent of registered voters staying at home, a figure, say many commentators, that reflects just how divorced the NDP has become from the electorate it purports to serve. In the second stage of the elections the NDP lost 47 seats as more than a third of its candidates failed to secure victory. The fate of 89 NDP candidates now hinges on run-off votes. In contrast the MB has made startling inroads, winning all six seats in Minya and breaking the NDP's monopoly in Menoufyia, birthplace of President Mubarak, where they won three seats. In Alexandria seven of the MB's 10 candidates emerged victorious. The NDP, analysts believe, desperately need to secure the two-thirds majority in the People's Assembly, by the end of the second round. If the NDP's poor showing at the polls has come as no surprise to most commentators the same cannot be said of the party's conduct during the election campaign. Thuggery, violence, the offering of bribes and vote rigging marred the second round of the vote, with NDP candidates and supporters by far the worst offenders. Such tactics have raised serious questions over the party's commitment to democratic transition through the ballot box and rendered its much-hyped "New Thinking" slogan all but meaningless. According to one human rights activist, in its desperate attempts to snatch the talismanic two-thirds majority the party's candidates were allegedly given a green light to do whatever was deemed necessary, including the hiring of thugs to terrorise voters. In the second round, commented another observer, the electorate witnessed the "NDP's democracy of mass destruction". Critics of the NDP hold the party responsible for "poisoning" the political process. "Vote-buying, thuggery, ambiguous slogans and platforms and a state apparatus hopelessly devoted to serving NDP candidates have all contributed to the disastrous state of affairs," Bahieddin Hassan, head of the Cairo Centre for Human Rights Studies, told the Weekly. The resort to violence is the latest in a series of what many observers view as fatal errors to beset the party's electoral performance. The selection of the least popular figures to run the campaign, the absence of a clear position on party members who opted to run as independents to the defeat of some of the NDP's key reformers such as Hossam Badrawi while the party's autocrats secured landslide victories all point, they argue, to a party in crisis. It is a concern that is even voiced within the NDP, with one prominent NDP insider, who requested anonymity, describing the atmosphere within the party as "scary and dangerous". "The party is shooting itself in the foot," the source told Al-Ahram Weekly. "They are provoking people by holding on to autocrats despite the credibility deficit they have with the public." At least part of the vote that went to the Muslim Brotherhood, pointed out the source, was a protest against the NDP retaining discredited figures. The party, say analysts, seems oblivious to the fact that more than 75 per cent of voters have effectively boycotted the poll. And the figure, says one human rights group, would have been higher were it not for the "electoral slave trade" that is thriving among the poor. "The voters are clearly sending some messages to the NDP during these elections," wrote Nader Fergani, lead editor of the Arab Human Development Report, in Al-Arabi newspaper, the mouthpiece of the Nasserist Party. "When voter turnout does not exceed 10-15 per cent in the parliamentary elections the message is clear -- the party is not connecting with the people." But is the NDP doing anything to contain its losses and address their cause? Mohamed Kamal, a leading member of the party's influential Policies Secretariat, does not share the doom and gloom of many commentators. Kamal thinks it premature at this stage to assess the party's electoral performance and calculate losses and gains. "We are in the middle of elections, our aim is to achieve a comfortable majority and we are heading in that direction," Kamal told the Weekly on Tuesday. "We will win the election and form the majority in the assembly." Commenting on Sunday's violence Kamal said that while the NDP did not condone such behaviour it was far from being solely responsible. Muslim Brotherhood candidates, he said, had committed their own infringements. But according to Mohamed Zari', spokesperson for the National Campaign for Election Monitoring, none of the organisation's observers has reported "Muslim Brotherhood supporters with guns or swords or knives, as was the case with NDP and independents' supporters". So what is the NDP going to do? According to one member of the Policies Secretariat the party has yet to hold an emergency meeting to discuss its poor showing. Nor, he told the Weekly, does it appear to have any strategy to recover the ground it has lost to the MB. "There is no strategy of any kind to combat electoral losses... the Brothers' coming," he said. Although the bulk of the post-second stage election debate focused on the MB's success, with pro-regime writers busy painting bleak scenarios, little thought appears to have been given to why the NDP has failed so dismally to appeal to the voters, let alone what this means for the process of political reform. "People have simply lost confidence in the party, while the events of bloody Sunday clearly mark the end of the NDP's attempts to repackage itself as a democracy- promoting entity," said Hassan. Several human rights organisations have already begun the process of contesting the results of elections in constituencies where bribes and violence were common, leading many to predict that Egypt's 2005 parliament will be short-lived.
