CAIRO - Two groups of activists with sympathy for democracy lobbyist Mohamed ElBaradei Saturday agreed to form a joint board of trustees to be responsible for coordinating their own activities and advising them on the best measures to put pressure on the Egyptian government to consider their political reform demands. The new board, which is headed by Abdel Gelil Moustafa, an engineering professor and a political activist, will hold regular meetings to discuss ideas for sharpening the effect of ElBaradei's National Society for Change and the Public Campaign for Supporting ElBaradei, both unlicensed movements seeking to bring about what they call “political reform” in Egypt. “The board will be a consultative body that will seek to unify the work of opposition groups lobbying for change in our country,” said Abdel Gelil Moustafa, the chairman of the new board. “We are in bad need for this unity,” he told The Egyptian Gazette in an interview. “Unity” seems to be the buzzword for Egypt's opposition after this opposition suffered what some people called a “humiliating” defeat at the hands of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) in the recent parliamentary elections. With more than 95 per cent of the seats of the legislature under its control, the NDP has uncontested manipulation of decision-making in the lower house of Parliament. ElBaradei himself was keen to drive this need for opposition unity home in a telephone call to his supporters on Saturday. He said opposition groups had to reach reconciliation so that they could be united in the face the government and its ruling party. The former atomic energy watchdog chief had earlier called on opposition groups to boycott the elections to embarrass the Government and the regime, but none seemed to heed his pleas for election boycott. Many in the opposition seemed to regret this. “We should have boycotted the elections from the very beginning,” said Gouda Abdel Khaliq, an economics professor and a member of the leftist el-Tagammu (the Unionist Progressive Party). “The opposition suffered the severest blow because of its desire to take part in this satire called parliamentary polls,” he added in an interview with the privately owned ON TV channel in the aftermath of the elections. While the ruling party had already secured overwhelming majority in Parliamentary, ElBaradei and his supporters do not seem to have lost hope in transforming this country. They are locked in a campaign of collecting powers of attorney in the name of ElBaradei so that he can speak for the people of Egypt against the government. So far, ElBaradei's supporters managed to collect more than half a million signatures from citizens across the nation. Despite this, legal experts and ruling party officials say these powers of attorney hold no legal value whatsoever., “We can also collect 5 million powers of attorney,” said Alieeddin Helal, the influential chairman of the Media Committee at the ruling, alluding to the ineffectiveness of the signatures collected in favour of ElBaradei. Even with this, the corridors of Egypt's political parties seem to be full of anger after most of these parties where banished from the Parliament by force of the last elections, deemed by many to be lacking the minimum fairness required for such elections. Some of these parties think of boycotting the next presidential elections, which are due to be held next year and are expected to witness scant competition to incumbent President Hosni Mubarak if he decides to run for a sixth term. “We are in bad need of real action,” Moustafa said. “Time is running out and everything gets from bad to worse,” he added.
