Senior NDP officials expect that the party will win almost half of all contested seats without a run-off, reports Gamal Essam El-Din The ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) is seeking a landslide victory in the 28 November parliamentary elections. As part of a three-pronged strategy to achieve its goal, senior NDP officials say the party will mobilise more than 90 per cent of its members in support of its 839 candidates. The NDP's website (ndp.org.eg) reveals that the NDP Secretary for Organisational Affairs Ahmed Ezz has instructed the chairmen of the party's provincial offices to do everything possible to mobilise "the NDP's voting bloc". According to one NDP insider "the party's central operation room in Cairo will send SMS messages from Ezz to the party's two million members instructing them to go out and vote for the party's candidates". The NDP's website also said the party had recruited 86,000 representatives to monitor polling stations and assess the turnout of members and "appointed 10,000 officials tasked with transporting party members to polling stations". An additional 200,000 young NDP members "will be available to guide party members to the polling stations and make sure that they vote for its candidates". Party officials expect its candidates to win around 228 seats in the first round, a little bit less than half the total of 508, and that as many as 280 NDP candidates could face a possible run-off. The official list of NDP candidates contains few surprises. It is dominated by high-profile businessmen and old guard politicians who are expected to secure their places in the People's Assembly in the first round of the polls. Nine cabinet ministers are standing, including three members of the outgoing parliament. The veterans are Youssef Boutros Ghali, minister of finance, who is running in north Cairo's district of Shubra; Sayed Mashaal, minister of military production, in Helwan and Ali Meselhi, minister of social solidarity, in Abu Kibir, Sharqiya. They are joined by Amin Abaza, minister of agriculture, in Al-Tilien, Sharqiya; Nasreddin Allam, minister of irrigation, in Juhayna, Sohag; Moufid Shehab, minister of state for legal and parliamentary affairs, in Moharrem Bey, Alexandria; Mohamed Abdel-Salam Al-Mahgoub, minister of local development, in Al-Raml, Alexandria; Fayza Abul-Naga, minister of state for international cooperation, in Port Said and Sameh Fahmi, minister of petroleum, in Nasr City. The list also includes a clutch of old guard septuagenarian politicians including Fathi Sorour, speaker of the People's Assembly since 1990, in the south Cairo's district of Al-Sayeda Zeinab and Zakaria Azmi, chief of presidential staff and NDP assistant secretary-general, in the east Cairo's district of Al-Zeitoun. Topping the list of supporters for the market economy and greater liberalisation are Ahmed Ezz, NDP secretary for organisational affairs and chairman of parliament's Budget Committee; Mohamed Abul-Enein, chairman of parliament's Industry Committee, in Giza; Mansour Amer, a former MP and owner of Amer Group for Tourist Development, in Shebin Al-Qanater; Mohamed El-Morshidi, a construction magnate, in Maadi and Talaat El-Qawwas, business textile tycoon, in the Downtown Cairo district of Abdeen. The party's list also includes many MPs in the outgoing parliament. According to NDP's Secretary-General Safwat El-Sherif, the NDP is fielding 839 candidates rather than the 508 it initially announced. "This includes 770 candidates competing for 444 seats in 222 districts, and 69 female candidates competing for 64 women-only seats in 32 districts. Out of the first batch of 770 candidates, 353 are current or former NDP parliamentary deputies and 417 are new faces." He added that 314 NDP candidates are less than 50 years old. The NDP's 69 women candidates, El-Sherif said, include 57 university graduates, including 19 PhD holders. Gamal Mubarak, the 47-year-old son of President Hosni Mubarak and chairman of the NDP's powerful Policies Committee, told Egyptian television on 11 November that "out of 3,700 members who registered as possible NDP candidates we selected just 839". Many of the 2,861 NDP members excluded from the list of candidates have complained that the selection process was marred by favouritism and influence-peddling. Some failed candidates have even threatened to support representatives of opposition parties. Responding to the criticism, El-Sherif said members who had registered as possible candidates were excluded from the party's list for several reasons. "Among these are that they failed to win over public opinion, lacked popularity on the street or had been implicated in corruption." Copts, says Naguib Gebril, a high-profile lawyer, are noticeably underrepresented, with the NDP list containing just 10. Then there is the odd situation of NDP candidates competing against one another in the same constituencies. "The party," says El-Sherif, "was forced to do this after it found out that many of its candidates enjoyed similar levels of popularity." "The NDP decided to field more than one candidate in some districts in which opposition rivals were standing, leaving the choice to the voters," says Ezz. "We want to ensure the majority of votes in the same district go to official NDP candidates at the expense of opposition and independent rivals, and to disrupt any alliances excluded candidates might seek to form with rival candidates." NDP officials have also suggested that the districts in which more than one official NDP candidate is running are characterised by strong tribal and familial bonds. "We aim to gain support of families in these districts simply by fielding their candidates," says Ezz. Independent political observers, however, note that the 125 districts in which the NDP is fielding more than one candidate are those in which it faces strong competition from the Muslim Brotherhood. as in the case of Al-Sayeda Zeinab district and the Sharqiya district of Darb Negm. Political analyst Ammar Ali Hassan points out that the NDP's decision to field several candidates for the same seats in so many districts means that at least 40 per cent of the competition in the upcoming polls will involve NDP candidates pitted against each other. "Not to mention," says Hassan, "that more than 3,000 of those who registered as independent candidates are originally NDP members who decided not to join the party's selection process and run independently."
