Ayman Nour's second place showing in last week's presidential polls has energised the Ghad Party. Mona El-Nahhas reports Forty-one-year-old Ghad Party Chairman Ayman Nour's second place finish in last week's presidential contest has raised Nour and his party's hopes for a strong showing in November's parliamentary elections. Nour's 7.6 per cent tally may appear minuscule compared to President Hosni Mubarak's 88.6 per cent, but it also represents a significant victory over the Wafd Party and its chairman Noaman Gomaa, who only got 2.7 per cent of the vote. Nour wants the Ghad Party to be the next parliament's opposition leader. The party is already busy preparing for the parliamentary races, with Nour saying they will field candidates in every single one of Egypt's estimated 222 constituencies. On Monday, Nour went to Mansoura to inaugurate a new party office. He plans on visiting all the different governorates during the course of the campaign. He has also decided to convene a general assembly meeting next Tuesday to confirm that the Ghad Party still wants him to be its chairman. Party members interviewed by Al-Ahram Weekly said they would be renewing their confidence in Nour, primarily because they felt he earned even more votes than the results indicated. During the three-week electoral campaign, much of the state-affiliated media seemed to imply that Gomaa, rather than Nour, would place second. Analysts said that dynamic actually boosted Nour's popularity, since many voters reacted negatively to what they saw as the state's support for Gomaa. To many, it looked like Nour was still being persecuted by the state. The Ghad Party chairman, after all, is also currently mired in a forgery trial, of which hearings are set to resume on 25 September. Nour says the case against him was fabricated by the state in order to ruin his political career. Ironically, the case has made him something of a hero. Even when -- in reaction to the US pressuring the government on Nour's behalf -- the ruling National Democratic Party launched a smear campaign accusing him of having inappropriate ties with Washington, Nour still retained public sympathy. According to Mohamed El-Sayed Said of Al-Ahram's Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, many anti- Mubarak voters decided to cast their votes for Nour because they saw him as "the victim of the regime, and the most radical opposition figure". Voting for Nour, Said said, was their way of "defying the regime". Said also attributed Nour's success to how young he is, as well as his ability to effectively play upon the public's feelings of discontent with the government. This may also explain, according to Said, why a great many Muslim Brotherhood members voted for Nour, despite their ideological differences with him. Brotherhood leaders denied backing Nour, or instructing their members to vote for any particular candidate in the first place. The group's deputy supreme guide, Mohamed Habib, said, "it was up to them to choose whoever they wanted, after evaluating the platforms of each candidate." Nour himself said he had not made any sort of backroom deals. He said he had met with the Brotherhood as part of his campaign, which included door- knocking missions to a spectrum of the nation's political forces. "This was my duty as a presidential candidate," he said. Nour claimed that many of his supporters were younger voters, including both Muslim Brothers and Copts. Nour's immediate reaction to the results was to call them fraudulent, and demand a recount, a request the Presidential Elections Commission rejected. At a press conference at the Ghad Party headquarters on Saturday, Nour said that the 2011 presidential elections would be between him and Gamal Mubarak. According to Nour, the idea of Mubarak appointing his successor was unacceptable. This characterisation of the 2011 race was unacceptable, however, to Al-Ahram's Said, who added that "It's still too early to draw the features of the 2011 presidential elections race and limit it to Mubarak and Nour. The current state of political turmoil may lead to numerous changes in Egypt in the next few years." Sources close to the Ghad Party are saying that Nour is trying to bring independent and Muslim Brotherhood MPs into his party ranks. Meanwhile, the Wafd Party, Nour's former home, has been busy licking its wounds, mainly by claiming that Nour's showing had more to do with Nour himself than the Ghad Party, which the Wafd considers young and inexperienced. In fact, the Wafd still sees itself as a strong competitor in the upcoming parliamentary races, even with Gomaa's poor showing.
