Long-term party loyalists have been excluded from the NDP's list of official candidates in the municipal elections, reports Gamal Essam El-Din While a campaign of arrests and obstacles placed before opposition candidates seeking to nominate themselves for the 8 April municipal elections virtually guarantees the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) will sweep the polls, internal party squabbles could yet take the lustre off so many uncontested seats. The publication of the party's official list of candidates, which was delayed until an hour before the registration process closed last Thursday at 5pm, left the NDP's old guard in dismay. Even figures who secured a majority in the party's electoral colleges held two weeks ago found their names excluded from the list. In Upper Egypt, old guard casualties included Mohamed Abdel-Mohsen Saleh, Bahaa Fikri and Ahmed El-Dardir, the former chairmen of the NDP's offices in the governorates of Assiut, Minya and Sohag, and currently the heads of the Assiut, Minya and Sohag city councils. Ahmed Abdel-Ghani and Mohamed Abdel-Latif, former chairmen of the NDP's offices in Qena and Fayoum were also overlooked. In the Nile Delta and Suez Canal governorates Mansour Abul-Hassan, chairman of the party's office and of the local council in the industrial centre of Mehalla Al-Kobra fell by the wayside, as did Mohamed Abdel-Latif and Ibrahim Abu Hashem, chairmen of the party's offices and city councils in Ismailia and Suez. That most of the casualties have occupied leading positions for two, sometimes three decades, leads many to conclude that their exclusion is little short of a coup against the old guard. It was, say political commentators, engineered by business tycoon Ahmed Ezz, the NDP's secretary for organisational affairs. Ezz, who is close to President Hosni Mubarak's younger son Gamal, was charged with preparing the party's list of candidates. Amr Hashem Rabie, a political analyst with Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, believes that the move is part of an ongoing, long-term strategy, to rid the party of its old guard. "This policy began in 2002 when sections within the party, led by Gamal Mubarak, embarked upon a campaign aimed at gradually ridding senior ranks of heavyweight old guard members such as former agriculture minister and NDP secretary-general Youssef Wali and former minister of state for legal and parliamentary affairs Kamal El-Shazli. Now the NDP is witnessing a second stage process of eliminating figures lower down the party ranks." Tellingly, says Rabie, most of those left off the lists were not only loyal to Wali and El-Shazli but were widely seen to have exploited their positions to establish local power bases that have prevented the advancement of younger members. The move, he argues, appears to have been designed to serve Gamal Mubarak should he run in the 2011 presidential elections. "If he decides to run, he will then be able to count on a cadre at the local level that owes him loyalty." How the exclusion of so many would-be candidates will pan out remains unclear. So far the strongest protests have come from the Nile Delta governorate of Daqahliya where party members, led by MP Sobhi El-Basandili, have threatened to submit their resignation from the party. El-Basandili is demanding that Maher Aql, chairman of the party's Daqahliya office, be dismissed. He accuses Aql of manipulating voter lists and the colleges to place his supporters on the list of candidates. In a letter sent to NDP Chairman President Hosni Mubarak, El-Basandili characterised the list of approved candidates for municipal elections as an insult to long-term party loyalists, claiming that as many as 100,000 party members in Daqahliya demanded Aql be dismissed. Should he remain in post, says El-Basandili, these members will leave the party. The Daqahliya case is just one example of the power struggles raging between NDP MPs and chairmen of provincial offices. Reports indicate that party members across most governorates have written complaints about the candidate lists to either Gamal Mubarak or NDP Secretary-General Safwat El-Sherif. In Cairo, though, party leaders appear to be taking such protests in their stride. Ezz says that he is pleased that overall as many as 40 per cent of old guard hopeful nominees were excluded in favour of younger candidates, boating that of the party's 52,000 official candidates 43 per cent are university graduates, five per cent hold PhDs and the remaining 52 per cent are all secondary school graduates. Ezz says he is particularly pleased that the lists contain 6,000 female candidates, and denies that the uproar in the party's ranks will result in serious internal divisions. "The most important challenge facing the party is to close ranks and win the largest number of seats in local councils," said Ezz, while El-Sherif insists that the emergence of new names was inevitable since "they are the ones most capable of implementing the NDP's drive for decentralisation in local councils."
