CAIRO - Six months after a court ordered their once-mammoth party dissolved, members of the former ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) are staging a controversial comeback. In the past few days, at least two rallies have been held by members of the now-defunct party, known in the local media as the ‘remnants of the former regime'. The rallying point for loyalists of Mubarak's party is collective resistance to a law, which Egypt's military rulers have said they are considering, that would bar leaders in the formerly governing party from practising politics. Opposition groups have been pushing the military rulers to tighten the political noose around these ‘remnants', so as to prevent them from contesting the forthcoming parliamentary elections, due to begin on November 28. Senior officials in the disgraced party are languishing in prison, facing charges ranging from corruption to involvement in a deadly crackdown on anti-Mubarak protesters earlier this year. However, thousands of the loyalists of the party are still there, bracing to compete in the planned parliamentary elections. They seek to enter Parliament either by standing as independents or running under the banners of political parties hailing from the NDP. At a mass rally held in the Upper Egyptian city of Qena last week, many of these loyalists threatened to cause trouble if they were stripped of their political rights, mainly the right to stand for Parliament. Some of them were quoted as vowing to disrupt rail services and declare Upper Egypt independent from the homeland. “They are Egyptians and represent big families and tribes in different provinces of the country,” said Moatez Mohamed, a co-founder of the Freedom Party, believed to comprise Mubarak loyalists. He was referring to ex-NDP members. “They continue to serve their people. Let the ballot box be the judge. Not all members of the National Democratic Party should be axed. You should only bring the corrupt to book,” he added. In mid-April, an Egyptian court dissolved Mubarak's party, which had dominated the country's politics for 30 years. It accused the party of corrupting Egypt's politics. Nonetheless, followers of the defunct party say they should not be sidelined from politics in the post-Mubarak Egypt without an unequivocal court injunction. “If not, this means we are the victims of unfair retaliation,” Ali el-Muselhei, an ex-governmental minister and NDP member, said in a recent TV interview. Unimpressed and even angered, opposition activists have started compiling ‘name and shame' lists of the Mubarak loyalists, to discourage the public from voting for them in the forthcoming polls. But there are increasing signs that followers of the former regime are up in arms and will never say die.
