CAIRO-Egypt's influential-yet-banned opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, is currently debating whether it will take part in the next parliamentary elections or not amid calls for the group's involvement and expectations that the polls will be a tough ride for the Islamist movement that continues to function outside the framework of legality in the country. Group officials say they will decide soon whether they will field candidates in the elections, which will take place in November, or not, and will base their future attitudes towards the elections in light of this decision. “We're currently discussing this,” said Mohamed el-Beltagui, a Brotherhood legislator and a member of the Guidance Office of the group.“The important thing for us is the presence of real elections where people are given the chance to choose their own candidates with their own free will,” he told The Egyptian Gazette in an interview. The Brotherhood is by far this country's most influential political power with members and offices across the nation. The group, whose candidates ran as independents in 2005 because the Egyptian Constitution does not allow for the presence of religious parties, managed to win one fifth of the seats in Parliament in polls that, independent election monitoring groups and judges said, were marred by violence and vote-rigging. Some members of the Muslim Brotherhood have called for boycotting the November elections, echoing an almost general attitude by the nation's opposition, because of the lack of what they call “sufficient guarantees” for holding fair election. Other group members, however, say election boycott will just mean that the required political change will be delayed. These people call for political involvement by the Muslim Brotherhood, saying this involvement will be a real tool for change in a country whose political waters have suffered stagnation for too long. “Boycott can be a weapon in a country where there is real democracy, a country where the ruling party listens to the opposition,” said Saad Emara, a Brotherhood executive from the coastal city of Damietta. But whether Emara likes it or not, the next elections will not be an easy ride for the Muslim Brotherhood if it decides to field candidates, observers say. The leaders of the ruling National Democratic Party keep issuing statements to assure Brotherhood detractors that the group will “never” be able to achieve its past parliamentary success. This message was repeated by almost every ruling party leader from Safwat el- Sherif, the Secretary General of the party, to Ahmed Ezz, the Chairman of the Organisation Committee at the party. Even with this, the group has already started co-ordination with other political powers with some group members suggesting a unified list of candidates with the other political powers to prevent rivalry that might benefit the ruling party at the end. El-Beltagui says the group has not settled yet on the kind of co-ordination it will have with the other political powers. “A unified list is one of the suggestions,” he said. The upcoming legislative elections are important in that the next Parliament will have a major say in who will rule Egypt next. President Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled since 1981, has not yet said whether he will seek re-election for a sixth term, but some groups call on his politician son Gamal, an influential policy-maker inside the ruling party, to run for president.
