A feeble "opposition" offers its two cents worth. Only the media is listening, writes Amira Howeidy At the precise moment that the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) began its annual conference on Tuesday noon, seven opposition parties were negotiating behind closed doors their own plan of action to lobby for political and constitutional reform. Naturally, the timing of this "group of seven" meeting (they were previously referred to by the media as the "group of eight" until one party pulled out) was seen as having been arranged to deliberately coincide with the NDP conference. While the group itself vehemently denied this link, it was the timing of the meeting that inspired dozens of media representatives to actually show up at the Nasserist Party's shabby downtown headquarters in anticipation of what the opposition parties had to say, on that particular day. "The various political forces expressed their demands for political reform in statements and documents issued in 1987, 1994, 1997, 1999 and 2000. But all the serious attempts for dialogue with the government and its party to achieve reform proved unsuccessful," said Rifaat El-Said, head of the left-wing Tagammu Party and the opposition parties' spokesman. "This is why," he told the gathered reporters in loud oratorical tones, "we decided to invite and engage the public in serious and continuous work as part of an organised and gradual movement to achieve the following demands." The six demands include adhering to "constitutional practices" by ending the 23-year-old emergency law, electing the president from amongst more than one candidate for a five-year term to be renewed only once, guaranteeing free elections supervised by the judiciary, allowing more freedoms in the formation of political parties, and securing the independence of professional and workers unions, and civil society groups. They also called for "emancipating" the media from the NDP's "control". According to Nasserist Party President Diaaeddin Dawoud, the announcement of these demands and the two-hour meeting that preceded it were just a prelude to further meetings that would eventually lead to a "wider" political rally that would include the various political forces. The date of the rally had yet to be set. It was not the first time that a group of opposition parties had made demands for political reforms, as El-Said explained when he reminded the attendants of five previous initiatives which date back as far as 1987. The shape of these demands and the people who propagated them may have changed, but for the past 17 years, their essence has remained the same. On the other side of the spectrum, the government has also consistently ignored calls for reform. In El-Said's judgment, nonetheless, "we have finally succeeded in forcing the political establishment to change its understanding of the concept of reform." Until recently, he said, "the [state-run] media was reiterating [clichés] on how we are witnessing the most prosperous era of democratic practice. I think we succeeded in changing that dynamic, and now the government itself is talking about reform." When one reporter argued that the public had lost faith in opposition parties' ability to implement any of their demands for reform, an angry El-Said snapped, "and were you delegated by the public to speak in their name?" El-Said's party, Tagammu, was one of eight parties which formed an Alliance of National Forces for Reform earlier this month, with the objective of ending the ruling party's monopoly of political life. In addition to Tagammu, the alliance included the Wafd, the Arab Nasserists, the Islamist-oriented frozen Labour, the Democratic Generation, the Umma, Egypt 2000 and the National Consensus, which later ambiguously "froze" its membership in the alliance. The banned Muslim Brotherhood -- believed to be Egypt's biggest opposition force -- was excluded from the alliance because it lacked legitimacy, according to El-Said. While every single one of the alliance parties' leaders attended the group's first meeting, by the time the alliance held its third meeting last week, only two leaders -- El-Said and Dawoud -- showed up; the other party leaders sent representatives. When asked how the alliance planned to inspire "the public" to campaign and exert pressure for these ambitious demands to be met, El-Said said they would collect signatures -- one million, to be precise. "You didn't address the likely renewal of President Hosni Mubarak's term," one reporter said. "That's because it wasn't discussed," replied El-Said. "Your statement does not state your position on the issue of hereditary succession," pointed out another. "We didn't discuss that," an increasingly impatient El-Said again snapped. The next step for the alliance, according to El-Said, would be to invite the various political forces, including the Muslim Brotherhood and members of the workers and professional unions, civil society groups, think tanks and intellectuals, to review the political statement issued by the group on Tuesday. For many observers, this was an all too familiar opposition party tactic that usually resulted in naught. Critics also argued that the opposition was trying too hard to play realpolitic with the political establishment, by both excluding the brotherhood and avoiding sensitive issues like Mubarak's likely decision to renew his presidential term for a fifth term. A more radical group consisting of human rights organisations, socialist activists, NGOs, would-be political parties and members of the Muslim Brotherhood, is pursuing its own "campaign for change". As Al-Ahram Weekly went to print, this group, which currently operates as the "Popular Movement for Change", was scheduled to hold a conference to brief the press on the progress of their campaign. They are now dubbed "the group of 500" by the media, in reference to the number of signatures they have collected in support of their campaign.
