President Hosni Mubarak's recent announcement that municipal elections will be held on 8 April has gone hand-in-hand with a police crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, reports Gamal Essam El-Din President Hosni Mubarak announced on Sunday that the long-delayed municipal elections would be held on 8 April, the announcement putting an end to rumours that the polls could be postponed for a further two years or until 2010. Municipal elections, routinely held every four years, were supposed to be held in 2006, but have been delayed. According to Minister of Local Development Abdel-Salam El-Mahgoub, the elections will be organised in accordance with two laws: the 1956 law on the exercise of political rights and the 1979 law on local administration. "This means that the individual candidacy system will apply to these polls, thus allowing independents from different political stripes [such as the Muslim Brotherhood] to run freely," El-Mahgoub indicated, adding that voting would take place from 8am to 7pm on 8 April. El-Mahgoub also indicated that the municipal polls would not be held under full judicial supervision, recalling that a law had been passed in 2006 eliminating the need for full judicial supervision of municipal elections. However, "this does not mean that there will not be judges supervising the local polls," he said. Rather, "senior judges will be in charge of supervising only the main polling stations and vote- counting stations, while auxiliary ones will be left to the supervision of state employees." He said that this round of municipal elections was particularly important because a new law was being drafted to provide local councils with greater powers. Such strengthening of the supervisory role played by local councils was part of a new "decentralisation" policy, El-Mahgoub said, that would mean that "members of elected local councils will enjoy greater supervisory powers over executive councils in Egypt's 26 governorates, and this is why voters should be more careful than ever in selecting their new representatives." Perhaps even more significant is the fact that amended Article 76 of the constitution now requires that political leaders aiming to run in the 2011 presidential elections obtain the signatures of 140 members of elected local councils (at the governorate level), with 10 signatures from 14 different governorates. This, political observers agree, makes it especially important for political parties to garner as many seats as possible in April's elections. According to recently released statistics, between 50,000 and 52,000 seats will be up for grabs in the polls, which has created a problem for the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), since as many as 82,000 members of the NDP have expressed a wish to run as official candidates. In the run-up to the elections, the NDP decided on Saturday that public rallies should be held in all of Egypt's 26 governorates to select the party's candidates. The NDP's Safwat El-Sherif indicated that 30 per cent of the party's candidates would be selected by the leadership, leaving the remaining 70 per cent to election at public rallies. El-Sherif also said that the party's new rules meant that 10 per cent of candidates running for municipal election at the governorate and city levels should be women. "This is in line with the party's philosophy that there should be greater scope for women and young people in political life," he said. At the village level, El-Sherif said, 65 per cent of NDP candidates would be left to the choice of members, while 10 per cent would be the decision of the chairmen of the local NDP offices. He said that 30,500 party members had applied to run in the municipal polls at the village level, where 29,500 seats are up for grabs. Recent reports indicate that the choice of candidates in local elections has led to conflicts within opposing blocs within the NDP. While NDP MPs are doing their best to impose their favoured candidates on the party's list. Chairmen of the party's provincial offices believe that "their men" should be included on the NDP's list of candidates. El-Sherif expects that 40 to 70 per cent of NDP candidates will be in favour of giving greater opportunities to young people and women. NDP leaders have also indicated that NDP members who have been members of the party for less than one year will be excluded from the running. Meanwhile, the NDP's enthusiasm for the municipal polls has been met with antipathy on the part of legal opposition parties and outlawed groups, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood. The opposition parties have either been hit by internal power struggles and dissent, or by a lack of the financial resources required to run in the immense number of seats available in the municipal polls. As for the 350,000 members of the Muslim Brotherhood, they have been under a police crackdown for more than a week. On Sunday, police arrested 51 members of the Brotherhood, most of whom were expected to run in the upcoming municipal polls. Brotherhood leaders were quick to assert that the string of arrests was part of an organised campaign aimed at deterring the group from contesting the elections. The municipal polls have already been delayed from 2006 to 2008 after Brotherhood candidates performed strongly in the 2005 parliamentary elections, winning an unprecedented 88 seats. "The NDP leaders have seized this two-year period to pass constitutional amendments in their favour, and now they plan to strip the Brotherhood of winning a single seat in the same way they did in the Shura Council elections last year," Essam El-Erian, the Brotherhood's political official, told Al-Ahram Weekly. El-Erian said the message was now clear: there will be no real elections, and most, if not all, of the seats will be reserved for NDP candidates. "The reason why NDP leaders are struggling hard to put themselves on the party's list of candidates is because they know that the party's sweep of the polls is a foregone conclusion," El-Erian said. The NDP won 99.9 per cent of the seats in the 2002 municipal elections. El-Erian said most of the arrested members of the Brotherhood were "highly qualified local Brotherhood leaders capable of winning a large number of seats in the elections at all levels." The police crackdown, however, has had the group's leaders divided over whether they should run or not. While Ahmed Abu Baraka, a Brotherhood MP, argues that the group should boycott the municipal polls in order "to spare the effort, money and arrests," El-Erian believes that the group should contest the elections whatever the costs. "This is another chance to tell the world that we are a group for peaceful change," he said. Mohamed Habib, the Brotherhood's deputy supreme guide, also said the group's leadership had not yet reached a decision on whether or not to run in the municipal elections. Insiders, however, emphasise that the group might keep the names of its candidates secret, in order to prevent their arrest. Nevertheless, even when Brotherhood members were able to escape police arrest and register in last March's Shura Council elections, they were faced with battalions of police flooding their districts and barring voters from participating at the polls. It seems possible that last March's Shura Council scenario will be repeated next April.
