So what does the Wafd stand for, asks Mohamed Abdel-Baky The Wafd Party's election operation room was staffed by five people during the first stage of the poll. For the run-offs it didn't need even this modest number. All except one independent candidate lost in the first round. Younger members of the party are already demanding the resignation of the chairman and the higher committee that presided over the collapse in the party's vote. In the first round the Wafd failed to clinch any independent seats. According to figures released by the Supreme Elections Committee it received 11 per cent of party list votes. On the basis of such a figure it can expect a total of 13 seats, five in Cairo, two in Kafr Al-Sheikh, three in Alexandria and one each in Port Said, Damietta and Assiut. The party seems to have been punished at the ballot box for what was at best a shaky campaign. Initially a member of the Democratic Alliance, the Wafd withdrew a month before the poll amid unseemly wrangling with the Muslim Brotherhood's FJP over the allocation of seats. "It was a mistake to join a coalition with the Muslim Brotherhood in the first democratic elections in Egypt's modern history and we have paid for it," says Essam Shihaa, a member of the Wafd's higher committee. Having spent four months negotiating with the Muslim Brotherhood over the allocation of seats, then two months deciding to leave the coalition, the Wafd began campaigning just a few weeks before the election date. Mustafa El-Guindi, who stood as a candidate for the Revolution Continues, resigned from the Wafd Party in September in protest at the coalition which, he says, betrayed the party's liberal principles. The Wafd, which was banned after the 1952 Revolution and only reappeared on the political scene following a 1983 court ruling, first entered into an alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1984 People's Assembly election when, as the only liberal opposition party, it won 57 seats. The collapse in support for the Wafd has sounded alarm bells among other liberal parties. "The Wafd's performance in the first round was shocking. We had expected it to do better, and reinforce the strength of civil parties contested the elections,"" says Mohamed Abul- Ghar, president of the Social Democrats, a leading member of the Egyptian Bloc. Wafd higher committee member Margaret Azer complains that the Egyptian Bloc and other liberal parties attacked the Wafd, undermining its liberal identity by describing it as crypto-Islamist, while the Islamists accused it of recruiting former NDP members as candidates. "Liberal parties viewed the Wafd as their main competitor rather than the Islamists parties," she says. The party, Azer insists, is working hard to strengthen its liberal image in the hope this will win over voters in the next two rounds. After withdrawing from Muslim Brotherhood coalition the Wafd seemed unable to decide what position it should occupy on the political landscape. In recent months it refused to participate in most of the protests in Tahrir Square, and seemed happy to kowtow to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. "I used to support the Wafd but after the revolution I could not understand where it was heading. I found the Egyptian Bloc more decisive," said Manar Mahmoud, a housewife. Ahmed Murad was put off voting for the party because its endless prevarication appeared dangerous, especially in a period of transition. Younger party members have accused Wafd leaders of alienating the Coptic vote, not only by their ill-fated alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood, but by denouncing calls from the Coptic Orthodox hierarchy to support the Egyptian Bloc.
