Should the constitution be amended before or after November's presidential elections? The opposition pendulum keeps swinging, reports Gamal Essam El-Din As the national dialogue meeting began on 31 January, National Democratic Party Secretary- General Safwat El-Sherif told opposition leaders that "there are no red lines on any issues pertaining to political and constitutional reform." NDP officials, however, were determined to emphasise two basic messages: that political reform comes from within, "rather than being imported from abroad"; and that there would be no foreign monitoring of this year's presidential and parliamentary ballots. Formed at the end of the first dialogue meeting, a committee -- whose members include the leaders of the Wafd and Tagammu parties Noaman Gomaa and Rifaat El-Said and NDP Assistant Secretary-General Kamal El-Shazli -- was also busy debating these two points, as well as setting out reform priorities and designing a timetable for subsequent dialogue sessions. El-Shazli said the dialogue's second session would be held on 15 February, and would be devoted to reviewing all the parties' visions on the constitution, as well as the laws regulating the exercise of political rights, formation of parties, and performance of the People's Assembly. The committee's work may prove difficult, however, in light of what appear to be mixed messages being issued by all of those involved in the process. The upper echelons of the NDP, for one, appeared to be contradicting themselves. On a plane heading to Nigeria last week, President Hosni Mubarak said that calls for amending the constitution were "futile". A few days later, other party leaders like El-Sherif said the NDP believes in amending the constitution, "but not now". Gamal Mubarak, the president's son and head of the NDP's powerful Policies Committee, also joined the fray, asserting that the heated debate on the constitution should be seen as a healthy sign. Similar contradictions could be seen in the stances taken by the two major opposition parties, the liberal Wafd and the leftist Tagammu. Wafd leader Gomaa said the party had done its best to convince the NDP that Egypt desperately needed broad political and constitutional reform. "Reforms," Gomaa said, "must not be left to the will of one individual, but be subject to national considerations that now necessitate transforming Egypt into a real democracy." Gomaa said his party believes that there is a pressing need to amend the constitution. "This," he said, "is a basic necessity to both turn the presidential referendum into a multi- candidate direct ballot and amend all legislations regulating freedoms and the exercise of political rights." At the same time, Gomaa declined to make clear whether his party was insisting that the constitution be amended ahead of next September's presidential referendum. Instead, Gomaa concentrated on an opposition proposal to set up a national committee aimed at drafting a new constitution. This committee, he said, must include opposition leaders, chiefs of judicial authorities, chairmen of professional syndicates and trade unions, and university professors of law; it would eventually "present the president with a modern constitution that gives the people's will the upper hand in a democratic state". Tagammu's position was equally ambiguous. According to El-Said, Tagammu agrees that amending the constitution is a top priority. "The presidential referendum must be scrapped in favour of a multi-candidate direct poll," he said, emphasising that the idea of "the president staying in power for more than two terms in office must be made invalid". According to El-Said, if the NDP insists that the constitution could only be changed after this fall's presidential referendum, then it would have to allow a committee to draft a new constitution in the next six months. After El-Said's statement was aired by the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera channel, the vast number of leading Tagammu members who subsequently said they strongly objected to their chairman's stance forced El-Said to tell his party's mouthpiece, Al-Ahali, "that Al-Jazeera had lied; and that the party insists on the constitution being amended ahead of the next presidential referendum". That u-turn then inspired the Tagammu party to stage a public protest in front of the People's Assembly last Sunday. Led by the party's Secretary-General Hussein Abdel-Razeq and three assistants, the protesters met parliamentary speaker Fathi Sorour, and presented him with a memorandum on political and constitutional reform. Abdel-Razeq told Al-Ahram Weekly that the Tagammu's ideas focussed on transforming Egypt into a parliamentary republic. They "also presented Sorour with a new constitution that was drafted by the Defence of Democracy Committee". Submitting this memorandum to Sorour, Abdel-Razeq said, was the Tagammu Party's way of emphasising that amending the constitution ahead of the presidential referendum was a demand on which there would be no compromise. "The Tagammu believes seven months is enough time to amend the constitution, especially the articles dealing with the powers and election of the president," Abdel- Razeq said. "You only need about two months to amend these articles," he said, after which they could be submitted to the People's Assembly for discussion and ratification. Abdel-Razeq told the Weekly that his meeting with Sorour was the beginning of a series of meetings the Tagammu aims to hold with representatives of all civil society organisations. "These meetings," said Abdel-Razeq "are not contrary to the national dialogue because their major objective is to mobilise all civil society organisations into rallying behind the opposition in their calls for broad constitutional reform." He said Sorour's reaction to the Tagammu constitution was generally positive. The speaker vowed to study it and then refer it to President Mubarak.
