CAIRO: Al-Ghad opposition party will officially launch late on Sunday a campaign to counter another initiated earlier last week by “The Popular Coalition to Support Gamal Mubarak” for the presidency in the 2011 elections. “The campaign, whose activities started last week, is not against Gamal Mubarak as a person. Rather, it is against the idea of pleading for his approval to rule Egypt,” Al Ghad's founder Ayman Nour told Daily News Egypt. “This is very humiliating to the … Egyptian people who are far greater than this,” he added. The campaign was launched under the slogan “Egypt is Too Big For You” and was joined by a number of opposition groups and parties including the Constitutional Party, the Egyptian Kefaya Movement for Change and Youths for Change. Led by Leftist Tagammu Party member Magdy El-Kurdy, the pro-Gamal Mubarak campaign drew wide criticism from opposition groups and parties; some of them interpreting it as a plot to rally support for him in his father's lifetime. Wall posters that put forward President Hosni Mubarak's 47-year-old son, also head of the policies secretariat of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), as a potential candidate for the 2011 presidential poll were spotted earlier last week on walls in some lower-income neighborhoods. Nour claims that some traditional coffee shops also hung up the pro-Gamal Mubarak posters on their walls, fearing possible problems with the authorities. The posters first carried the slogan “Gamal…Egypt”, followed by new ones appeared which read “Gamal for All Egyptians.” El-Kurdy said in recent press statements that the coalition plans to print half a million proxies start collecting signatures first in the countryside then move on to other parts of Egypt. According to El-Kurdy, after collecting the first 100,000 signatures, the coalition will call on Gamal Mubarak to run for president as “a public mandate.” “Such a campaign is part of a long-term [plan] that kicked off in 2000 [when Gamal Mubarak [was first introduced to Egyptian society as a politician],” Nour argued. “It is obvious to anybody that [El-Kurdy's campaign] is an attempt to legitimatize the inheritance of power in Egypt,” he added.
