CAIRO: The Egyptian Bloc said it will stage a demonstration in front of the Supreme Elections Commission (SEC) office on Thursday morning to protest its reluctance to give the bloc a unified electoral symbol. Members of the bloc expressed their surprise to what they described as “explicit rejection” directed at them, in addition to “the breach of the principles of fair competition with other alliances”, said Nabil Zaki, the representative of the leftist Tagammu party in the bloc. “We applied for a unified symbol, which is the ‘flag', since the very beginning but until now and despite issuing it to other alliances, SEC has ignored us,” he added. He noted that the lack of a unified symbol would confuse voters and negatively affect the bloc's performance in the elections, especially in the process of sorting and counting of the votes their electoral lists got. He stressed that the bloc didn't threaten to boycott the upcoming parliamentary elections as a response to SEC actions. The Egypt Bloc, the main liberal alliance competing in elections, now consists of only three parties, the Free Egyptians Party, which gets 50 percent of the slots on the lists, the Social Democratic Party with 40 percent, and al-Tagammu with 10 percent. The bloc was originally formed on August 15 as a coalition made up of 14 liberal and leftist political parties, but broke up over disagreement on the number of places each party would get on the list. Some of the parties that quit the alliance claimed members of the disbanded National Democratic Party were included in the electoral lists.
