The seventh annual convention of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) begins Saturday on the heels of the party's sweeping victory in an electoral race widely dismissed as “fraudulent”. Under the slogan “To Secure the Future of Your Children”, thousands of NDP leaders and members are convening in Cairo for three days to discuss a package of party policies. As NDP chairman, President Hosni Mubarak will deliver an inaugural speech in the evening setting out a blueprint for party work in the coming year. The year 2011 is crucial for Egypt's politics, as it holds the much-anticipated presidential election. The question of who will succeed the frail 82-year-old president remains ambiguous. In the last seven years, the president's son Gamal Mubarak, currently serving as NDP assistant secretary general, has come to the fore as a potential successor. According to observers, Gamal has used the party's annual conference as a platform to shine and assert leverage within the party. Each year, Gamal has either been promoted to a higher position or given the floor to unveil some groundbreaking policy, exacerbating speculations about his ascendancy to the presidency. Yet in recent months, such speculation lost momentum after top party leaders refused to affirm that Mubarak junior is the party's sole candidate in the presidential elections. In response, analysts said such statements attest to a split within the party over Gamal's chances. At today's convention, the party is expected to celebrate its grab of over 80 percent of the parliament's 508 contested seats. Opposition parties barely secured three percent. The NDP triumph was accompanied by abundant reports of vote rigging. Monitors cited a number of violations including ballot stuffing in favor of NDP candidates and the intimidation of non-NDP voters and campaigners. Aside from NDP domination, the most notable aspect of the results was the full exclusion of the banned-but-tolerated Muslim Brotherhood from the People's Assembly. By contrast, the nation's oldest Islamist organization had won 20 percent of parliamentary seats in 2005. While commentators contend that Islamists lost due to vote fixing, the NDP cites people's disillusionment with the group's “manipulative” ideology. “In 2010, the society realized that those (Islamist) MPs were strangers and were unaware of the people's condition,” wrote Ahmed Ezz, an NDP stalwart, in Friday's issue of the state-owned Al-Ahram daily. “The citizen had cast a punitive ballot against those who had played with religion for the last five years,” added the architect of the party's electoral campaign and Gamal's powerful protége.
