Although invalidated by several court rulings, last week's by-elections were held to fill 22 vacant seats in the People's Assembly and the Shura Council, Gamal Essam El-Din reports A first round of parliamentary by-elections were held on 25 December in 11 governorates. They aimed to fill 22 seats left vacant by 17 draft-dodging MPs (16 from the People's Assembly and one from the Shura Council), four who passed away (two from the People's Assembly and two from the Shura Council), and one People's Assembly MP whose parliamentary membership was revoked. A second round of run-off by- elections was held yesterday in 9 governorates to fill 13 seats. The by-elections were held despite the fact that at least 13 court rulings (10 from the Administrative Court and three from the Supreme Administrative Court) declared them null and void. The courts emphasised that the race for the seats left vacant by the 17 draft-dodgers had to be limited to those who ran in the original elections for those same seats in 2000. The liberal-oriented Wafd newspaper described the by-elections as "a funeral for constitutional legitimacy in Egypt". Wafd Party parliamentary speaker Mounir Fakhri Abdel-Nour warned that the by- elections could end up paving the ground for an invalidation of the entire People's Assembly. The judicial rulings declaring the by-elections null and void, Abdel- Nour suggested, could be used to ask the Supreme Constitutional Court to dissolve the Assembly itself. National Democratic Party (NDP) Secretary-General Safwat El-Sherif said the by-elections were organised in a climate of complete democracy, freedom and impartiality. Seven NDP members won People's Assembly seats, while independents were victorious in two of the contests. One of the independents, businessman Ahmed Salama of south Cairo's El-Sayeda Zeinab district, defeated NDP heavyweight and business tycoon Gamal Hanafi for a Shura Council seat. Hanafi, a construction magnate, had major party support. His defeat prompted pundits to say that the ruling party's reform movement is not moving in the right direction "because the old guard -- with their personal interests and constant malpractice -- still have the upper hand". Yesterday's run-off by-elections involved 26 candidates running in 13 districts affiliated to nine governorates. Twelve featured competition between NDP candidates and so-called NDP independents, most of whom are former members of the ruling party. This dynamic brought about opposition claims that not only were the by-elections illegitimate, they were mainly a matter of NDP members vying against each other. Yesterday's most significant competition was in Tala (in the Delta governorate of El- Minya) between Talaat El-Sadat (one of many contenders for the chairmanship of the opposition Liberal Party) and Ahmed Raslan, the official NDP candidate and the brother of Mohamed Raslan, the chairman of the NDP's Menoufiya office. El-Sadat had the support of Jihan El- Sadat, the wife of late President Anwar El- Sadat, who traveled to Mit Abul-Kom (a village affiliated to Tala and the birthplace of Anwar El-Sadat) to muster support for Talaat, who is the late president's nephew. The Tala district seat was left vacant after the People's Assembly revoked the parliamentary membership of Abdallah Tayel, an NDP bigwig and the former chairman of parliament's economic committee, who was convicted of embezzling LE262 million and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Another significant competition raged in Kerdasah (Giza governorate) between NDP candidate Farida El-Zommer, a famous TV announcer, and independent Khaled Tayie. Tayie is the son of Tamer Tayie, a NDP MP who passed away last summer. At the Assembly itself, meanwhile, NDP MP Abdel-Moneim Radi from North Cairo's Rod El-Farag district was involved in a major dispute over whether or not he had a legitimate excuse for not having done his military service. On 15 December, Radi admitted that he had paid a fine against failing to perform military service. He also submitted his resignation as a "necessary step to keep my reputation intact, especially after serving 16 years in parliament". Later, Radi presented Assembly Speaker Fathi Sorour with a certificate proving that he was not a draft dodger. The certificate, according to a report prepared by the Assembly's Legislative and Constitutional Committee, showed that Radi submitted a petition to the Military Court saying the fine he paid was illegal "because it was based on incorrect information about his birth date". Radi said the court thought he was born in 1942, although he was actually born in 1950. "My father and mother married in 1948," Radi explained. As a result, Radi's petition was accepted by the Military Court, which indicated that Radi was exempted from doing military service "because he was his divorced mother's only breadwinner, which continued to be the case until he had turned 30." The opposition, and especially the Wafd Party, seized on Radi's case to blast the NDP-dominated Assembly's image. The liberal Wafd Party charged that Radi had forged a new identity card in which he faked his birth date and also claimed that Radi used his influential position as a Rod El-Farag NDP MP to bribe officials there into giving him the new card. Wafd Party leader No'man Gomaa accused speaker Sorour of not dealing with what was clearly a case of forgery. The party's paper stepped up its campaign after a fire struck the Rod El- Farag Civil Registration Office on 27 December, asking whether the fire had burned Radi's file. During the heated parliamentary debates on Saturday, Sorour referred Mohamed Morsi, the speaker of the banned Muslim Brotherhood, to an ethics committee after he tried to use the debate to "tarnish" the NDP's image and "its flagrant derision of court rulings". Sorour relented after Morsi submitted an "apology".
