By effectively excluding the opposition parties from parliament, the ruling National Democratic Party may have got more than it bargained for, says Salah Eissa* The joy has faded away as fast as it built up. The jubilation of the leaders of the National Democratic Party (NDP) at their spectacular parliamentary victory has been short-lived. Now they, along with the opposition, have to provide rational answers to one difficult question: what next? What these leaders now have in their hands is the opposite of a hung parliament, the reverse of a lame-duck executive. What they have instead is a parliament that is unable to function either as the regulator of the laws or the referee of the government. The indignation of the opposition -- all its cries of foul play -- also now pale in comparison. The opposition is bleeding and furious, but the NDP is in even worse shape. When it went for broke in the recent elections, it got more than it bargained for, and it has now got itself into more trouble than it may have imagined was possible. What the NDP wanted was to keep the Muslim Brotherhood out, replacing it with a secular opposition handpicked from among the Wafd, Tagammu and Nasserist parties. However, it has only got half of what it wanted. It is true that the Brotherhood is not now represented in parliament, only one Brotherhood MP managing to leap the defences the ruling party had put in place to block the group's candidates. The NDP pronounced itself happy with the result, chief whip Ahmed Ezz declaring that parliament had been "liberated" from the Brotherhood. Yet, the bad news is that parliament has also been liberated from all traces of genuine opposition. The Nasserist Party was not able to get a foot in the door. The Wafd got seven seats and the Tagammu four. Smaller parties, such as the Ghad, Al-Geel and the Social Justice and Democratic Peace Party, got one seat each. This leaves the NDP with 420 seats, or nearly 83 per cent of seats in parliament. NDP independents, being candidates who violated party regulations in order to join the race, ended up with 53 seats, or 10.4 per cent. It is not clear whether these independents will rejoin the ruling party, giving the NDP a total of 473 seats, or 93 per cent of the seats in parliament. Compare this with the 14 seats, or 2.7 per cent, won by the opposition, along with non partisan independents who snatched 17 seats, or 3.3 per cent. These are unprecedented figures. Since its creation in 1979, the NDP has made a point of controlling two-thirds of the seats in parliament or more, enough to hinder the opposition from holding a vote of confidence or trying to impeach the president. For most of the time, the NDP has been happy with 80 per cent of the seats, leaving the rest to the opposition or independents. This time, however, things have really gone too far. Even for the ruling NDP, the opposition has its uses. When the government submits laws to parliament, most of these have been drafted in committees of the ruling party, especially the NDP's influential Policies Committee. In order for these draft laws to be properly revised and any flaws in them pointed out, the government needs a body to examine them carefully. However, the NDP is a tightly-run ship. It spends a lot of time disciplining its members and teaching them to toe the party line. This being so, NDP members are unlikely to offer any serious assessment of the government's draft laws, and this essential task has always been performed by the opposition. Now that the opposition has been more or less expelled from parliament, with the exception of the barest handful of MPs, it seems likely that this essential task will be compromised. As a result, it is possible that this legislative role will now go undone. An opposition that holds a meagre 2.7 per cent of the seats in parliament cannot be expected to examine the barrage of legislation that parliament handles each year. NDP MPs are loathe to question the actions of their own government, and they are not in the habit of asking officials to attend public hearings. This task, crucial to parliamentary oversight, has traditionally been performed by the opposition. But the opposition needs to have a sizeable, not token, presence in parliament if it is to hold the government accountable. Moreover, now that the opposition has been deprived of its parliamentary clout, it is more likely to shift its energy to the streets. It may now hold more marches and protests, both of which are discouraged by the NDP. What should the NDP do to handle these problems? One course of action would be for the NDP to free its parliamentarians from the tradition of loyalty and allow them to discuss draft laws submitted by the government freely, even encouraging them to request officials to attend hearings. The problem with this course would be that it runs against everything the NDP and its whips have always tried to do, which is to impose strict party discipline. Allowing freedom of this sort to party members and encouraging them to criticise the government in ways that could raise their own profile would make them more liked among their constituents, possibly undermining the party as a whole. The second option would be to keep NDP defectors out of the parliamentary party. The 53 seats won by NDP defectors would thus remain outside the party's regular structure. Should the defectors ask to rejoin the NDP, the whips could turn them away under this second option, forcing them to join the opposition. This policy would raise the number of opposition MPs to 70, or 12.6%, enough to exercise oversight and revise legislation. A third option would be for the NDP to recognise the existence of various currents within its own ranks. If it allowed members of these different currents the freedom to organise themselves, while remaining within the party's overall structure, things could get interesting. The 53 defectors could become the seed of an autonomous opposition movement within the NDP itself, for example. A fourth option would be for the NDP to face the fact that the opposition parties are no longer large enough to represent the whole gamut of public opinion. This being so, the NDP should consider turning itself into a broad front that would represent a variety of political views. Within the party itself, the NDP could then allow the various strands to assert themselves, even eventually spinning off to form independent parties. This would be a way for a new kind of political pluralism to emerge, in the same way that happened when the previously dominant Arab Socialist Party split into various "pulpits", later becoming independent parties, in the early 1970s. There is also the matter of the forthcoming presidential elections. Although some opposition parties, by virtue of having parliamentary seats, are entitled to nominate candidates for the presidency, few are in a position to come up with a credible candidate. While the Tagammu is capable of putting forward a viable candidate, it has no intention of doing so under current circumstances. Yet, unless one of the opposition parties comes up with a credible candidate, the next presidential elections will look as if they have been settled in advance -- which is not exactly what public opinion at home and abroad is hoping for. This, too, could be a problem for the NDP, and the party may be able to avoid it by allowing a quorum of independent MPs and members of the Shura Council, the parliament's Upper House -- say 65 from the Lower House and 35 from the Upper House -- to support an independent public figure to run against the NDP candidate in the presidential elections. This could breathe life into elections that could otherwise look faked. None of the above will be easy, but the NDP is not in an easy position. While it has sought to resolve one problem, in doing so it has created others. * The writer is editor-in-chief of Al-Qahira weekly newspaper
