Results of the parliamentary polls created a crisis in the leftist Tagammu Party, reports Mona El-Nahhas Dozens of leading figures of the leftist Tagammu Party in Port Said submitted their collective resignations on Tuesday to protest against what they called flagrant rigging of the polls and against the lenient stance adopted by the Tagammu in the face of what they called electoral fraud practiced by the ruling NDP. Out of the 76 Tagammu candidates, only one, Abdel-Rashid Helal, made his way to parliament. Six candidates of the Tagammu will take part in the re- run due to be held on Sunday: Ra'fat Seif (Daqahlia), Mohamed Abdel-Aziz (Cairo), Dia'a Rashwan (Luxor), Abdel-Fattah Mohamed (Alexandria), Ahmed Suleiman (Port Said) and Abdel-Hamid Kamal (Suez). El-Badri Farghali, a former Tagammu MP who lost his parliamentary seat, topped the list of those who resigned. "My resignation is final," Farghali stressed, accusing the current leadership of the party of being involved with the regime in undermining the Tagammu. "The governing system in Egypt managed to turn all opposition parties into ineffectual entities. After the severe blow we got, I think it's time for the Tagammu and all opposition parties to stop rubbing shoulders with the government and take tangible steps towards achieving political change," Farghali said. Reacting to Farghali's resignation, Rifa'at El-Said, chairman of the Tagammu Party, stressed that Farghali would back down from his resignation announcement as soon as he calmed down. "Farghali has every right to be angry after going through such a harsh electoral experience. Nobody is satisfied with the results of the polls or by the way they were run," El-Said said. Immediately following the polls results, El-Said described them as "the worst in the history of parliamentary life in Egypt." According to El-Said, the Tagammu candidates went through "a very bad experience" where thuggery and rigging had the upper hand in running the electoral process. "Unlimited expenditure exceeded all expectations, not to mention acts of thuggery," El-Said noted. "Thugs hired by NDP candidates intimidated heads of balloting stations and obliged them to fill in electoral cards," he charged. Hussein Abdel-Razeq, head of the party's chairmanship council, does not expect next Sunday's re- run to be much different. "The same scenario will be repeated since the ruling NDP has made up its mind not to leave a single constituency," he said. Asked about Egypt's political future in the wake of the polls, Abdel-Razeq drew a rather bleak picture in which the public, fed up with achieving reform by peaceful means, would want violence to realise the target. Abdel-Razeq expects endless clashes between the public and the government. Ahead of the polls, a large group of Tagammu's leading figures were against taking part in the run- off, refusing, they said, to be the tool which legitimises electoral fraud. However, the party's secretariat- general decided they should take part in the polls, viewing it as offering the Tagammu a ripe chance to meet the public and present its political agenda. The Tagammu has been sharply criticised for losing common ground with the public. The party has apparently lost credibility among the people who now perceive it as becoming a branch of the ruling NDP.
