The official spin on the new cabinet paints it as a serious attempt to bring in the new. Not everyone was convinced, writes Amira Howeidy The fact that 14 of the outgoing cabinet's 34 ministers were replaced, and that most of the new members are far younger than their outgoing counterparts, did not seem to impress political figures and experts interviewed by Al-Ahram Weekly. "I've been hearing about the reformist wing in the [ruling] National Democratic Party (NDP) for a long time now, but I have yet to see evidence of it," said Diaa Rashwan of Al-Ahram's Centre for Political and Strategic Studies. In fact, Rashwan doesn't think such a reformist wing even exists. Similarly, he doesn't "see how the new cabinet reflects a new trend as such". The media has been inundating the public with news of the cabinet change, painting it in the light of a struggle between "reformists" and "conservatives" that has finally resulted in the new, youthful, and technocratic government formed this week. The "young" 52-year old CIT minister who founded the "smart" village was labelled together with the vast majority of the 14 new ministers as "technocrats". On the other hand, outgoing ministers such as Youssef Wali (agriculture), Mufid Shehab (higher education), Hussein Kamel Bahaaedin (education) and Safwat El-Sherif (information) were labelled "old-guard". While this might be an accurate way to describe the situation in Iran (where a genuine reformist trend is at odds with the Islamic Revolution's old guard), or Iraq (which is dependent on technocrats for the de-Baathification process), it is questionable whether it appllies in the case in Egypt. Decades of political stagnation have made political parties, groups, organisations and members of civil society, in addition to a wide array of political and public figures, weary of there ever being a chance for meaningful political practice. They cite the 23-year old emergency law as just one example of the harsh measures adopted by the state to control and virtually render political activity useless. Repeated demands for scrapping martial law, lifting restrictions on the formation of political parties, and modifying the constitution to allow for electing the president and limiting his presidential terms, have been ignored. Even recent signals from the political establishment indicating an "inclination" to lift the emergency law as part of Egypt's "reform" efforts, appear to have been misread, as they never materialised. Raswhan also took issue with the appointment of six new ministers with engineering backgrounds. "They call them technocrats, [which means] they are probably specialists in their original fields, but what are they doing sitting on ministries that are not remotely related to their background? Why do we have a new education minister who is specialised in bridges? And why is the new Minister of Administrative Development a communications engineer?" What is particularly disturbing about the new cabinet, he added, is its "lack of political vision". By that, Rashwan means the new members -- including the prime minister himself -- have no political experience. "The reshuffle coincides with international chaos, a flare-up in the Middle East, internal and external pressure for reform, and intense domestic problems, and this cabinet knows nothing about these issues," he said. "It is very essential when running a country to know that country. We don't know who those people are and they don't know this country well either. This is done through the exercise of political activity, which is not the case with this cabinet," Rashwan said. Even the extremely unpopular previous government now appears better in comparison, "because many of the outgoing ministers had political experience and vision, although they too were technocrats". Hussein Abdel-Razeq, secretary general of the left-wing Tagammu Party, judged the new cabinet as a rehash of the same technocrat-dominated politics that Egypt has been living since the 1952 Revolution dissolved all political parties. "There has been no political or partisan life in Egypt," he told the Weekly. "There is no rotation of power. There is one party, the NDP, which has appeared in the past under different names like the Arab Socialist Union or the Misr Party. But they all remain the same." Emphasis on the youthfulness of the new cabinet is only meant to give the illusion that the state is trying to find a way out of current economic, political and social crises, when in fact this is not true," Abdel-Razeq said "The only difference between the new cabinet and the outgoing one is that the new cabinet wants to open the doors wider for free commerce, and privatisation of what remains of the public sector, and specifically the four big banks that are still owned by the public sector and insurance companies. In other words," he said, "they want to speed up an economic policy that started [with the open-door policy] in 1974." Although the so-called "old-guard" ministers were on board with the same policy, they were reluctant to fully respond to the "brutal neo-liberal", as critics call them, demands of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) because they were aware of the potential negative economic and social implications. Nasserist MP Hamdeen El-Sabahi said, "the new government's primary task would be to speed up the process." The new cabinet, El-Sabahi said, "is not in the least interested in constitutional or even political reform". It is good to have "new blood" at the decision-making helm, he told the Weekly, "but what good is this big reshuffle when the constitution and the laws remain unchanged, and when the presidential institution dominates everything?" Unless, he added "this is a transitional government ahead of the November 2005 presidential elections when President Hosni Mubarak is expected to nominate himself for a fifth term." Hinting at the speculation over the political future of President Mubarak's younger son, Gamal, El-Sabahi wondered if the new government was "preparing the public for a more youthful leadership". For Hassan Nafaa, head of the political science department at Cairo University's Faculty of Political Science, "the upcoming NDP convention will resolve a lot of this speculation, [since] it will determine Gamal Mubarak's role in the NDP." The younger Mubarak currently heads the party's powerful policies committee. For Nafaa, pundits and the public the big question now is: "who will succeed the president."
