CAIRO (Update) - After a tense meeting at their Cairo headquarters, leaders of Egypt's largest opposition party Al-Wafd announced Thursday boycotting a parliamentary election runoff on Sunday in protest against what they called the “massive” irregularities committed in the first round of the vote last Sunday. Party leaders almost came to blows as they streamed onto the historic premises of the party in the quiet residential area of Dokki to discuss whether they should allow their candidates to compete over seats in the election runoff, which was also boycotted by the Muslim Brotherhood, the nation's largest outlawed-but-tolerated opposition movement. “We shouldn't allow our great party to be tarnished by participating in dishonest and unfair elections,” said one party member who was there to find out what his party leaders would do about the runoff. “We do not have real elections. We cannot allow ourselves to be mere ornaments of the farcical democracy the regime wants to impose on us,” he told The Egyptian Gazette in an interview. Supporters of Atef el-Ashmuni, a contender from Al-Wafd in Sunday's runoffs, protested the withdrawal decision. Al-Wafd, a secular liberal party with historical leaderships that had the chance to hold Egypt's helm before the 1952 Revolution, won two seats only, while the ruling National Democratic Party harvested 209 seats on November 28. Opposition and independent candidates say the vote was rigged, while video clips on social networking websites showed some candidates paying money so that voters would cast ballot for them. Meanwhile, Chairman of the Higher Election Commission Abdel Aziz Omar said that quitting the race was illegally unacceptable. “The deadline for quitting candidacy had finished before the elections,” said the commission in a statement. The Nasserist party, who won no seat in the first round, said it was quitting too in protest against alleged vote fraud. The elections had brought Egypt criticism from the US administration and lobby groups around the world, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Four people were killed and scores of others were wounded in election violence scenes of which on TV showed unidentified men holding machine guns and firing shots in the sky to scare off the supporters of rival candidates. The ruling National Democratic Party counters rigging and fraud claims by saying election losers had nothing else to say, having failed to garner the necessary support for their parliamentary candidacy. Chairman of the Political Education Committee at the ruling party Mohamed Kamal said the opposition just wanted to spoil the joy of victory for the ruling party. But this victory was put to the test Thursday also as the Higher Election Commission, which supervises the elections, convened to consider the reasons for the resignation of one of its members in Al- Arish in the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. The member, Ayman Ahmed el-Wardany, cited election fraud as the reason for his resignation. A day earlier, a colleague of his, Walid el-Shafae who also announced that he would not participate in supervising the election runoff on Sunday, said the election was a mere lie. “When I accepted to supervise the elections, I never expected it to be that bad,” el- Shafae said. “I thought the lengthy talks about election fairness from Higher Election Commission members was applicable. But I later discovered that this was not possible,” he added in statements to the press. El-Shafae said the election commission was not given the tools to make the necessary purification of election rolls. He added that the commission was not also given the chance to supervise the elections in a factual sense. “The commission only received voter and candidate complaints and announced the election results, whole the Interior Ministry was responsible for everything else,” el-Shafae said. As he said this, several election losers met at the independent Bar Association in central Cairo to talk about their experiences in the first round of the elections. They called their meeting “Democracy's Morning Ceremony”, prompting tens of policemen to cordon off the union and declare emergency in the area. Other political parties are also mulling the idea of boycotting the Sunday runoff. This was happy news for Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the international atomic energy watchdog, who considered the decision to boycott the runoff a “good chance for change” in Egypt. “This is the best way the opposition can react to those who killed freedom in Egypt,” El-Baradei said. “Participating in the elections runs counter to the desire of the public,” he added on his page on the social networking website Twitter. Despite this, Chairman of the Higher Election Commission Abdel Aziz Youssef said these parties and political powers did not have the right to withdraw from the elections, having missed the deadline for doing this, which was two weeks before the polls started. He referred to an opposition candidate who announced his withdrawal during voting, but his decision was not considered but this withdrawal should have been made two weeks before the elections.
