The People's Assembly will be busy hammering out the details of President Mubarak's proposal, reports Gamal Essam El-Din On the surface, President Hosni Mubarak's proposal to amend the way the president is elected heralds an end to more than five decades of yes- or-no referendums. Independent and opposition political analysts, however, warned that the proposal might end up being mere democratic window-dressing. They said the "devil is in the details" which are currently being worked out by the People's Assembly and Shura Council. The assembly's General Committee held two meetings on Monday and Tuesday, coming up with an initial report recommending how the proposal should be applied. The committee was chaired by Deputy Assembly Speaker Amal Othman, and included the chairmen of seven committees, as well as MPs representing four opposition parties, and one MP representing the parliament's independent deputies. NDP Assistant Secretary-General Kamal El-Shazli, the parliamentary affairs minister, also took part. The committee's report will be discussed at a 9 March assembly plenary meeting. (The Shura Council will discuss a report prepared by its legislative committee on Saturday). Assembly Speaker Fathi Sorour said Mubarak's proposal would be discussed in stages. "If the [general] committee's report is approved," Sorour said, the proposal would then move to the Legislative and Constitutional Affairs Committee. There, predicted Sorour, the debate would take about two months, with the Shura Council report being discussed in tandem. Afterwards, the legislative committee would submit its report to the assembly, which will debate it on 9 May. "If two-thirds of the MPs approve it, the final stage involves the proposed amendment being put up for a public referendum," Sorour said. While discussing Mubarak's proposal, the General Committee examined the way presidential elections are conducted in countries like France, Ireland, Algeria, Tunisia, Russia, the Ukraine, Yemen, Senegal, Portugal and Indonesia. All of these places, the committee said, have measures ensuring that nominees are "serious" and "patriotic". "This stipulation," the committee's report said, "is very important to deter opportunistic candidates from nominating themselves, so that the entire election process is confined to a limited number of serious candidates." One of these measures includes obliging candidates to obtain the backing of a reasonable number of elected MPs in the People's Assembly, Shura Council and municipal councils. Sorour indicated that the requirement would be smaller than the one currently stipulated by the constitution (one-third of the People's Assembly's elected MPs). Analysts are predicting that presidential candidates will need the backing of 20 per cent of elected MPs and members of municipal councils. The number of elected MPs in the People's Assembly stands at 444 (out of a total 454); in the Shura Council, there are 132 (out of a total 264); and some 3,230 serve in municipal councils. If the predictions were accurate, that would mean candidates would have to obtain the support of 762 elected officials in total. The committee's report also said candidates should have widespread national support, which would be proven via the backing of elected members of municipal councils in more than half of Egypt's 26 governorates. Most political analysts agreed that these requirements would make it extremely difficult for independents to run for president. Mohamed Farid Hassanein, a former independent MP who resigned from parliament last year, said the proposed conditions not only discriminated against independents, but would also unleash the floodgates of "bribery and kickbacks. Getting the backing of elected MPs and members of municipal councils means that candidates will have to spend money on bribes everywhere." Hassanein, a businessman, has already announced his intention to run for president this year. Sorour said candidates fielded by political parties in this year's presidential elections would be exempted from the stipulations. "2005 will be an exceptional case because most opposition parties do not have an adequate number of MPs in parliament," he said. "In future presidential elections, however, candidates fielded by opposition parties will be treated on equal footing with independents." The committee's report said the candidates fielded by political parties must come from the party's leadership, but need not be confined to the party's chairman, its deputies or the secretary-general. Critics of the proposal said it needed to be coupled with amendments of other related constitutional articles as well. Article 75, for instance, states that a presidential candidate must be born to Egyptian parents and be at least 40 years old. "The opposition wants this article changed to state that presidential candidates must submit a document to parliament detailing their wealth, and that this document be published in all newspapers," Hussein Abdel-Razeq, secretary-general of the Tagammu Party, told Al-Ahram Weekly. The opposition also wants Article 77 changed to state that the president's term in office should be four rather than six years, and that he/she only be allowed to serve two successive terms. Cairo University constitutional law professor Tharwat Badawi called the proposed amendment "a sham". He said it was "insignificant", because it gives elected MPs in the People's Assembly, Shura Council and members of local municipal councils an upper hand in the type of candidates that can run for president. "It's a fact," Badawi said, "that all parliamentary institutions and local councils are dominated by the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), which means that the proposed amendment is just cosmetic, because in any case it maintains the NDP's monopoly over political life." Badawi said the amendment would spur the NDP into trying to win as many parliamentary seats as it could, so it maintains the majority required to nominate its desired presidential candidate. "As usual," he said, "the NDP will maintain this majority by rigging parliamentary elections, and using the Interior Ministry to manipulate [the situation] in its favour." That was also why, Badawi said, the NDP was always so adamantly against any foreign monitoring of presidential and parliamentary elections. "They allege that this monitoring is a breach of Egypt's independence, but the fact remains that it is an NDP manoeuvre [meant to protect] the rigging of elections in its favour." Instead, the assembly's General Committee recommended that Egypt emulate France when it came to setting up a commission entrusted with supervising the presidential elections. "In France, this commission includes a mix of judicial and political members," the report said. It recommended that the commission include -- in addition to the chairmen of judicial authorities -- the speaker of the People's Assembly, the speaker of Shura Council (who is also the NDP's secretary-general) and other figures to be selected by the assembly's speaker and the council's chairman. Rumours are rampant that the chairman of the Supreme Constitutional Court is a strong candidate to head the commission. According to Badawi, the fact that both the assembly and Shura council speakers are veteran NDP leaders represents a serious breach of the commission's independence and integrity. "All the commission members must be independent [so that], as Mubarak's proposal alleges, it is not biased in favour of a certain candidate," Badawi said. In any case, all of those who spoke to the Weekly agreed that President Mubarak was the only candidate who could easily meet all the conditions stipulated by his proposal.
