New assembly, new start

By Ibrahim Nafie
Next Wednesday the People's Assembly will inaugurate the first session of its next term, the eighth since the inception of the parliamentary body in 1971 and the sixth under the presidency of Hosni Mubarak. As our first parliament of the third millennium it will face formidable challenges. It is only natural, therefore, that we should ask whether it is up to the tasks ahead.
There can be no contesting the fact that parliament will be full of new faces. For the first time elections were held under full judicial supervision, which, along with other provisions to guarantee the integrity of the electoral process, meant that many parliamentary old-timers were ousted, replaced by a significant number of younger members. This alone holds the promise of a new era of vitality. The Assembly's dynamism should be further enhanced by the fact that it is more representative of the spectrum of political opinion in Egypt than ever before, with a significant proportion of seats having been won by candidates from the various opposition parties and by representatives of other political orientations who ran as independents.
The voters who brought in this parliament, having demonstrated their faith in the integrity of the ballot through an unprecedentedly high turnout, have every right to expect it to rise to meet the hopes they vested in it. If the parliament is to fulfil this pledge faithfully, it must attune itself closely to the fundamental concerns and pressing needs of the people it represents. Towards this end, therefore, the government and opposition must work together as closely and as smoothly as possible. While the National Democratic Party (NDP) holds a clear majority in the assembly, opposition forces will have an important voice, but one that must be exercised maturely, in a manner that places general welfare over narrow partisan considerations and that contributes rather than detracts from parliament's efficacy. In the wake of their rather poor performance in recent polls, one would imagine that the opposition parties would seek to use the upcoming term to regain the ground lost in their grassroots support and to reestablish their record of public service in as constructive a manner as possible.
Also vital to parliament's efficacy in fulfilling its remit is the selection of the parliamentary subcommittees, where the nitty-gritty of the assembly's work takes place. With ten former committee chairmen defeated in the elections and 70 per of seats going to faces new to parliament, this will by no means be easy. Nevertheless, there are many MPs with considerable parliamentary expertise to choose from.
The People's Assembly is certain to have a full agenda, one that reflects great ambitions but also poses formidable challenges. Above all it will be incumbent on our legislators to build upon the successes already scored by the economic reform programme since it was set into motion in the early 1990s. This entails continuing to equip the economy for the challenges posed by globalisation.
The assembly's agenda, therefore, will include a quantity of new economic legislation, the most important being the bills for a Unified Labour Law and for a Unified Companies Law. As this is the era of the growth of economic blocs, our parliament will further be expected to work towards the revival and promotion of inter-Arab economic cooperation, whether through an Arab common market, free trade zones or other bilateral and multilateral agreements.
The political issues our legislature will have to contend with are no less important than the economic tasks before it, and can be subsumed under the broad heading of democratisation. This parliament, voted in through incontestably free and fair elections, will be expected to dedicate itself more earnestly than its predecessors towards promoting the cause of democracy in Egypt. We anticipate, moreover, that one of its immediate concerns, in light of some of the technical problems in the recent elections, will be to address certain aspects of the electoral law pertaining to such issues as the definition of workers and peasants, voter registration lists and streamlining the paperwork of the electoral process in general.
This parliament's agenda will also contain many crucial issues that effect broad segments of our society. It will be expected, for example, to promote legislation generating work opportunities and adequate housing for the young, to enhance the status of women in order to enable this half of society to stake a more active role in public life, to address the bane of private lessons that weighs heavy on our educational system and to improve public health and social services in general. All these concerns are fundamental to social development, to which the government attaches the highest priority on the principle that development must serve the people while, simultaneously, people are the key to development.
If the preceding are the major issues that have imposed themselves on the legislature's agenda in advance, the mechanisms of parliamentary work and developments in society at large are certain to complicate further the tasks ahead. It is of great importance, then, that parliament retain the public's confidence. That confidence, though, is not a blank cheque; rather it must be assiduously sustained, which, in turn, demands that our parliamentary representatives adhere to the highest ethical standards. In terms of the brass tacks of lawmaking, this entails, for example, close scrutiny of legislation to ensure consistency with existing laws and the Constitution, thereby forestalling the situation, embarrassingly frequent in previous parliaments, in which rapidly formulated laws are passed only to be overturned by the Supreme Constitutional Court. The attitudes that create the tone of parliament as a whole are equally important. We would hope that our deputies in the forthcoming People's Assembly will refrain from indulging in absenteeism, petty partisanship and abuse of parliamentary immunity, all of which marred previous parliaments. They must, in short, place public welfare above all other considerations.
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