The Tagammu Party will join Wafd and the Nasserists at November's parliamentary hustings, reports Gamal Essam El-Din The leftist Tagammu Party has joined the Wafd and Nasserist parties in rejecting ex-International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed El-Baradei's call to boycott November's parliamentary elections. In a conference held on 2 October, Tagammu Chairman Rifaat El-Said announced that the party's secretariat-general had voted unanimously in favour of taking part in the elections. According to El-Said, the vote does not mean that the party is abandoning its demands for election guarantees. "Existing election guarantees fall far short of what is required to ensure the upcoming elections are transparent and fair," he said. El-Said criticised the Higher Election Commission (HEC) for its failure to act. "The HEC should be doing everything possible to stem the tide of extravagant spending on election campaigns, to prevent religious and sectarian slogans being raised of any administrative interference with the election results. It is not. There are growing signs the election will be manipulated in favour of the ruling NDP. Although it has not yet announced the names of its candidates provincial governors are already mobilised to help the party's candidates, especially the cabinet ministers among them." "The HEC," he concluded, "should hurry up and redress these violations." El-Said also urged state-owned information media, including television channels and national newspapers, to provide fair coverage of the election campaigns of all candidates. "It is a sad fact that in their coverage the national press seeks to give the impression that the election battle involves only NDP candidates, particularly members of the government and the party's business tycoons." El-Said denied allegations that his party had opted for participation after concluding a deal with the regime guaranteeing it more parliamentary seats. "There are those who claim that in return for participating we will be allowed to win far more seats in the next parliament. This is rubbish," said El-Said. "We are a respectable party. We are not for sale." El-Said says that he hopes that participating parties from the Coalition of Egyptian Opposition Parties (CEOP) -- which includes the Wafd, Tagammu and Nasserists -- will coordinate their campaigns. "We should make sure that CEOP candidates do not compete against each other in districts where one of them enjoys strong support," said El-Said. "In districts where the Tagammu's candidates enjoy high popularity, for instance, the Wafd and Nasserists should abstain from fielding rival candidates. In this way the CEOP can win seats at the expense of the ruling NDP and the Muslim Brotherhood." The Tagammu will be fielding 83 candidates in 22 governorates. "The list includes nine women and eight Copts," said El-Said. "We would have liked to have fielded a greater number but couldn't owing to the party's chronic shortage of funds." Among the party's candidates are Mohamed Abdel-Aziz Shaaban, the Tagammu's sole current MP, in the East Cairo district of Hadayek Al-Qobba; Amina Shafik, a journalist with Al-Ahram newspaper, in the downtown Cairo district of Boulaq, and former MP El-Badri Farghali, standing in Port Said. The liberal-oriented National Democratic Front, led by Al-Ahram journalist Osama El-Ghazali Harb, is boycotting the upcoming poll and has decided to withdraw from the CEOP. Harb points out that CEOP members agreed in a conference held last March that they would boycott the election if their demands for greater election guarantees were rejected by the regime. So why, he asks, when those demands have been completely ignored, did parties like Wafd and Tagammu decide to participate? Harb accuses the Wafd, in particular, of betraying the opposition and concluding a secret deal with the NDP. "The Wafd has chosen to let the nation down," said Harb. "The last hope now is that the Egyptian people will themselves abstain from voting and boycott the election." The Ghad (Tomorrow) Party, led by political activist Ayman Nour, has also voted in favour of a boycott. According to Nour, "Ghad does not want to be a part of an election wholly lacking transparency." Harb and Nour both support El-Baradei, who last month called for the election to be boycotted. On 1 October El-Baradei once again urged Egyptians to boycott the election. "The NDP's response to the opposition's demands on election guarantees," he wrote on Twitter, "was one more form of deception." The decision of the Wafd, Tagammu and the Nasserists to participate in the election gave a green light for the outlawed movement of Muslim Brotherhood to follow suit. Saad El-Katatni, leader of the Brotherhood's parliamentary bloc, announced on 2 October that the movement would be fielding candidates, though this has yet to be confirmed by the group's Guidance Bureau. The movement, which is helping El-Baradei to collect signatures in support of his reform manifesto, says the 800,000 amassed so far is far short of the million signatures it had hoped to garner.
