As parliamentary hopefuls scramble to register, squabbles among political parties continue over who should run the show, Gamal Essam El-Din reports Candidate registration for Egypt's first parliamentary elections following the 25 January Revolution has been extended until Saturday. The move came after bitter arguments hit the various alliances of political parties over the division of party-list. "Political parties asked the Supreme Electoral Commission [SEC] and SCAF [the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces] to extend the registration period to 22 October to give them a chance to wrap up their own lists of candidates," said Abdel-Moez Ibrahim, SEC chairman. The first six days of registration saw a large number of former deputies of deposed president Hosni Mubarak's defunct ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) registering. Reports suggest the majority of NDP candidates is concentrated in Upper Egyptian governorates. In Alexandria Tarek Talaat Mustafa, a former NDP heavyweight and brother of Hisham Talaat Mustafa, the construction magnate who was sentenced to 15 years in prison for conspiring to murder his ex-mistress, registered as an independent candidate. He is expected to face the Muslim Brotherhood's Sobhi Saleh. NDP remnants, as well as registering as independent candidates, will compete for party list seats under the banner of several newly formed political parties. Al-Horreya and the Egyptian Citizen Parties are fielding many Mubarak stalwarts on their lists. Minister of Justice Mohamed Abdel-Aziz El-Guindi indicated on 15 October that revised legislation will effectively ban members of the defunct NDP's politburo, secretariat-general, and policies committee from standing. Former NDP MPs who were not members of these bodies, says El-Guindi, "can only be banned from political life by judicial order". The decision of the Wafd Party to include the names of some former NDP MPs on its list of candidates has caused disputes among the party rank and file. Most of the members of the former NDP who have registered as candidates were not in the party's senior ranks. The Wafd, say party officials, "opted to include some former NDP members on its list after ascertaining that they enjoyed high levels of support among their constituents". The Democratic Alliance -- the coalition that once included the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party and the Wafd -- appears to be increasingly divided following the latter's withdrawal. The Wafd's exit was soon followed by the Nasserist Party and the Al-Gamaa Al-Islamiya's Reconstruction and Development Party. Sameh Ashour, chairman of the Nasserist party, accused the Muslim Brotherhood of imposing its candidates on the Alliance's list at the expense of other coalition members. Al-Gamaa Al-Islamiya has opted to ally itself with the Salafist Asala and Nour parties. The old Islamist Labour Party is also expected to join. The number of parties that are members of the Democratic Alliance has dropped from 34 to 16. The Alliance, say officials, will field 332 candidates, of which 166, 50 per cent of the total, will be from the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party. The so-called Egyptian Bloc, an alliance of secular-oriented parties, has also faced divisions. Misr Horreya (Egypt Freedom) Party, led by political analyst Amr Hamzawy, withdrew in order to join a new leftist grouping, The Revolution is On. The latter now includes the Nasserists and Popular Socialist Alliance, an offshoot of the Tagammu Party. The number of parties belonging to the Egyptian Bloc has dropped from 20 to five -- the Free Egyptians, sponsored by Coptic business tycoon Naguib Sawiris; the Egyptian Social Democratic Party; the Tagammu Party; the Liberal-oriented Democratic Front and the Sufi Tahrir Party. The youth movements of the 25 January Revolution have mostly refrained from forming alliances. The Egyptian Revolution Party, led by Tarek Zeidan, is fielding its own list of candidates, as is the National Association for Change, led by presidential hopeful Mohamed El-Baradie. The 6 April Movement will not be fielding candidates though it has prepared a blacklist of more than 500 members of the defunct NDP who are planning to stand. On 16 October SEC chairman Ibrahim announced that "2,908 candidates registered in the first five days, 2,721 of them for the People's Assembly and 187 for the Shura Council." The numbers are very low compared to previous elections but will rise over the next few days as the various alliances submit their candidate lists. Ibrahim also announced that campaign spending limits had been fixed at LE500,000 for individual candidates, and LE1 million for party lists.
