Speculation time is over; the campaign for September's presidential election is now up and running. Gamal Essam El-Din reports Although scheduled for September, the campaign for Egypt's 2005 presidential referendum has already shifted into high gear. Over the past few weeks, three prominent political and civil society figures have made high- profile announcements that they are planning to run for president against incumbent President Hosni Mubarak. In a 3 January statement the three would-be contenders, sociologist Saadeddin Ibrahim, feminist novelist and activist Nawal El-Saadawi, and former MP Mohamed Farid Hassanein -- also said they planned to collect one million signatures on a petition calling on parliament to amend the constitution to allow more than one candidate to run for president. The statement appeared to be in response to a 30 December announcement by the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) that it would be nominating Mubarak for a fifth six- year term. The nomination, said NDP Secretary-General Safwat El-Sherif, would take place at the People's Assembly in May, with the presidential referendum scheduled for September. Mubarak's nomination for a fifth presidential term had been shrouded in obscurity, speculation and rumour during past months. The most wide- spread among these was a rumour that the president's son, Gamal, who chairs the NDP's influential Policies Committee, would succeed to the presidency, either through the current referendum system, or via a constitutional amendment allowing direct popular election of the president from among several candidates. The recent announcements by the NDP have, for all practical purposes, brought a decisive end to all speculation on the matter. Calls by opposition parties and various civil society organisations for constitutional change vis-à-vis the president's powers and election method are not new. They've been repeated regularly ahead of every new presidential election and in between. This time around, however, such calls are being made with much more intensity and are considerably more outspoken in tone. It is widely acknowledged that post-9/11 international, and particularly American, pressures on Arab states, including Egypt, to reform have whet the appetites of local opposition groups. According to the current Constitution, the Peoples Assembly selects a single candidate for the president's post, who is then approved or rejected by popular referendum. To be eligible for nomination before parliament a presidential hopeful must first be endorsed by at least one third of its members. He must then win a two-thirds majority in parliament to be put up for a popular vote. It is this system that the various opposition parties and coalitions would like to see scrapped through constitutional amendment. One of these groups, the Defence of Democracy Committee, led by leftist Tagammu Party Secretary-General Hussein Abdel-Razeq, unveiled a draft constitution on Monday that aims to curtail many of the president's current powers, and make him more accountable to an elected parliament. Abdel- Razeq said he aims to use the draft to put more pressure on the regime to democratise. He cited the Palestinian presidential elections as a model to be emulated. The debate on the subject has become so heated that a movement calling itself the Popular Campaign for Change (also known as " Kifaya ", or Enough) staged a public protest on 12 December against a fifth term for Mubarak. Its spokesman, Abdel-Halim Qandil, told Al- Ahram Weekly that "the campaign plans to hold another protest rally on 18 January in order to mobilise the public behind calls to change the constitution and alert the foreign media to the regime's dictatorial practices and stubborn rejection of a free and direct presidential ballot." Another coalition, known as the Consensus Movement (comprising the three main opposition parties -- the Tagammu, Wafd and Nasserist), sharply criticised the NDP this week, charging that nine months before the presidential referendum, NDP Assistant Secretary-General Kamal El-Shazli had already announced that Mubarak would be re-elected for another six years, and that he would be taking the oath of office at a historic parliamentary session. In a statement, the movement said El-Shazli's announcement -- published on the front pages of most national newspapers late last week -- was in stark violation of the constitution, democracy and the people's will to choose a president freely. "It demonstrates that the NDP's leading ranks show no respect for the people, and are contemptuous of their [political] will," the statement said. On 8 January, President Mubarak responded in person to the controversy over his re-nomination. On a television talk show, he said that he welcomed "100 rivals for the presidency". During a tour of Aswan, he also appeared to informally begin his own campaign by emphasising that his policies had the average citizen's needs in mind. NDP leaders also joined the fray. El-Sherif claimed that even though some opposition parties were calling for a change of the constitution, most of them, in fact, agreed with the NDP on the necessity of a new term for Mubarak. According to El-Sherif the constitution may be amended, but only after the presidential referendum -- because there is not enough time to do so now". Another NDP heavyweight, parliamentary speaker Fathi Sorour, said he was surprised that so many persons had decided to nominate themselves against Mubarak, considering the difficulty they would face in winning the endorsement of one third of parliament members of their nomination. According to Sorour, Egypt's multi- party system meant that only parties that had strong parliamentary representation were truly qualified to nominate candidates for the presidency. At present, the NDP holds 85 per cent of the assembly's seats. The debate over the forthcoming presidential election is also making itself felt in the media. The weekly Rose El-Youssef, for instance, accused Saadeddin Ibrahim, the most prominent of the three contenders of collaborating with the US and Israel to defame Egypt's image. The magazine cynically called Ibrahim, Saadawi and Hassanein "the merry trio". Ibrahim -- who recently told the Associated Press that he wanted to run for president in order to "break the barrier of fear and intimidation" -- has also been increasingly outspoken in criticising Mubarak. In an opinion article published last November, Ibrahim claimed Mubarak enjoyed the god-king powers of an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh, saying that no other head of state in modern Egyptian history had enjoyed as much power. The 67-year-old Ibrahim, who spent 15 months in prison before being cleared of charges that he had defamed Egypt's image and illegally received funds from the European Union to monitor the 1995 elections, also plans to monitor both the parliamentary and presidential elections in 2005. He defiantly told Reuters that he was "sure the authorities will be annoyed, but that is their problem". The two other would-be presidential nominees, Saadawi and Hassanein, present a liberal reform agenda similar to that put forward by Ibrahim. Saadawi, however, diverges from both Ibrahim and Hassanein over relations with the US. Ibrahim and Hassanein say they would like to achieve American "neutrality" in the Arab-Israeli conflict, while for 73-year old Saadawi, the emphasis should be "on building up solidarity and cooperation with the global people's movement against neo-colonial plunder and aggression by the US and Israel." Saadawi's platform also includes calls for agrarian reform, a ceiling on land ownership, and limiting taxes to the rich. Hassanein, 66, is a maverick politician and businessman who joined forces with Ibrahim last week to monitor the Palestinian presidential elections. His primary claim to fame was leading anti-US demonstrations in the lead up to the Iraq war, and resigning from parliament in 2004, because, as he said then, he had discovered that "MPs have nothing to do except toeing the government line."
