Dina Ezzat ponders the likelihood of the NDP's conference becoming a real watershed in the party The highlight of the National Democratic Party's two-day conference, which opens today, will be tomorrow's closing speech by President Hosni Mubarak, in which he is expected to address a wide range of domestic issues as well as the ongoing process of reform within the party. It is widely anticipated that Mubarak's speech will provide the crescendo to the tune of change that will be played, in one key or another, throughout the conference. Sources within the NDP suggest the conference will not only consolidate the position of reformers within the party, but will see them emerge victorious. The reformist wing of the party, led by Gamal Mubarak, the younger son of the president and the chair of the Policies Secretariat, appears at last to have triumphed over the old guard, the main representatives of which are NDP Secretary-General and Shura Council Speaker Safwat El-Sherif and NDP Assistant Secretary and State Minister for Parliamentary Affairs Kamal El-Shazli. "The game is almost over. The presidential elections revealed the ability of the Gamal Mubarak camp to manage an impressive and modern campaign that won the president support from quarters of the population that would have been alienated by the crude propaganda of Safwat El-Sherif," says one NDP member close to Gamal Mubarak. The battle between the reformers and old guard has been rumbling on since Gamal Mubarak joined the NDP. Within the party he was viewed, at the time, as clever and ambitious but untried. Despite his relationship with the president, and the support of some of the president's closest advisers who were growing increasingly frustrated with the monopoly over the party exercised by El-Sherif and El-Shazli, Gamal Mubarak had to work hard, not least to prove to the president that he had some real contribution to make. "It wasn't easy. But since 2002, when Gamal was appointed chairman of the Policies Secretariat, and up to this month's elections, the president has become increasingly convinced that the modernisation of the party, and of the regime itself, will pay off," one close associate of Gamal Mubarak told the Weekly. The feedback received by the president through a variety of channels during his presidential campaign, which was masterminded and orchestrated by Gamal Mubarak, convinced him that the tactics employed by El-Sherif and El-Shazli, who would threaten officials in NDP offices throughout the governorates if they failed to deliver enough support for the party, had become a liability. Members of the Gamal Mubarak camp say the recent presidential elections may well be the last straw for old guard, which has seen a steady decline in its influence. "Who would have thought that Safwat El-Sherif would have been removed from the Ministry of Information or that the powers of Kamal El-Shazli would have been reduced as happened in the July 2003 cabinet reshuffle," commented one. The NDP conference, sources suggest, is likely to further reduce that influence. "What I can say is that they will be more marginalised than ever," revealed the source. So will Gamal Mubarak be given extra powers, even without an extra title? Will El-Sherif and El-Shazli loose their titles and, with them, whatever influence they continue to exercise? Nobody knows exactly what is in the mind of the president is the formula most NDP members use to skirt such questions. What they hint at, though, is that the president has no reason to sideline the team that engineered his electoral victory. Indeed, the rise of the Gamal Mubarak camp is already being demonstrated in public. Ahmed Ezz and Mohamed Kamal, who assisted Gamal Mubarak in running his father's campaign, are making more official appearances than before. This week both men were invited to the banquet President Mubarak hosted for visiting Libyan Leader Muammar Gaddafi -- their seats were not far from those taken by El-Sherif and El-Shazli -- and both attended the preparatory meetings that preceded today's NDP conference. More significantly, perhaps, they were, say sources, consulted by Gamal Mubarak on the draft of the president's speech to be delivered tomorrow. They are also key advisors on the nomination of NDP candidates for parliamentary elections slated for November.
