!--Session data-- A pro-Gamal Mubarak campaign has announced it has collected more than 46,000 signatures supporting his nomination in the forthcoming presidential election. The campaign, entitled “Egypt is Looking to a New Beginning” claims to have gathered 22,935 electronic signatures via the internet in addition to 24,000 handwritten signatures. Marwa Hodhod, director of the movement, said that it began in Mansheyet Nasser and will next go to al-Zawya and Sharabiyya, another two of Cairo's poorest districts. Daker Abdelah, coordinator of the Gammaliyya branch, said it is achieving great results and has already gathered 5000 signatures in just four days. He added that the campaign will print 10,000 posters to counter the anti-Gamal campaign titled “Egypt is Larger than You”. In Damietta, Adel al-Sharabas, coordinator for the Gamal Mubarak Support Coalition, said the number of signatures in support of his nomination has reached 26,000. He added that Samir Zaher, head of the Egyptian Football Federation, has expressed support for the coalition and donated a large sum of money to it to enable it to facilitate gathering as many signatures as possible. In Beni Suef, a youth-based movement named the “National Coalition for Support” has started its own signature-gathering campaign with the aim of introducing an alternative to the National Association for Change, founded by Mohamed ElBaradei, former chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency and another potential candidate in the 2011 presidential election. Meanwhile, political experts have said that the campaigns springing up in support of the younger Mubarak are intended to test the waters to find out how receptive Egyptians at large would be to his candidacy. Gamal Mubarak, 46, is one of one of those most likely to stand in the presidential election, particularly since he is already one of the leaders of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP). According to a constitutional amendment in 2007, a presidential nominee has to be a leading member of a legal party for at least one year before the date of the election. Independent candidates can only run in the election if they manage to gather signatures of at least 250 members of Egypt's elected bodies. Experts say it is almost impossible to satisfy this condition since the majority of the members of such councils are NDP candidates. The amendment has to all intents and purposes blocked members from the Muslim Brotherhood, military officers, and ElBaradei from nomination, according to the experts. Leaders from the NDP say that President Hosni Mubarak, 82, is still the party's nominee for the election, despite rumors about the deterioration of his health, especially since he underwent surgery in Germany to remove a benign tumor earlier this year. Translated from the Arabic Edition.
