CAIRO: The Journalists' Syndicate board elections, scheduled to take place Oct. 14, have been postponed indefinitely, cancelled by an administrative court ruling Thursday. According to the ruling, elections cannot be held since the syndicate's acting chairman, Salah Abdel Maqsoud, does not have the authority to call for them. This also means that the entire elections process will have to be repeated, starting from candidates submitting applications. “All of the candidates were together in a meeting [late Thursday] when the news broke,” prompting a flurry of action, said journalist Khalifa Gaballah. Gaballah, journalist at independent daily Al-Masry Al-Youm who is running in the board members elections, said the syndicate's lawyer rushed to file an appeal against the ruling but ran out of time before the court closes. “Even if the ruling was refuted in time, elections would have had to be repeated since the news of the cancellation spread around the country and would have affected the number of attendees tomorrow,” he added. If less than 50 percent of the syndicate's general assembly is present at the elections, then according to the law, it has to be repeated, he added. According to a complaint filed by journalist Khaled El-Assy, also a candidate, Abdel Maqsoud is not officially the head of the syndicate, since former chairman Makram Mohamed Ahmed has only announced his resignation without officially submitting the necessary documents. Technically, that makes Ahmed the current chairman and the only one with the authority to call for elections. Ahmed, criticized for being a supporter of the former regime, resigned last February after hundreds of journalists demanded he step down. Based on the bylaws, the oldest syndicate deputy takes over in these cases, which at the time happened to be Abdel Maqsoud, who is also a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Since then, the syndicate's board was dissolved and new elections were scheduled. “The situation is unclear, and has been ever since the revolution. No one is following matters closely,” said Gaballah, who added that many other complaints are expected to be issued. “We were discussing in the meeting the possibility of having a transitional board which organizes elections and manages operations for now,” he explained.
