AN alliance of several opposition parties on Saturday assailed the ruling National Democratic Party for what they called “its manipulation of Egypt's political life” and called for applying pressure on the Government so that it would amend the Constitution and initiate political reform. The alliance, which comprises the nation's major political parties, such as Al-Wafd, Al-Tagammu, and the Nasserite Party, called on Egyptians across Egypt to join hands to save what they termed as “the vestiges of a good country that remained here”. “This is time for unity,” said Sameh Ashour, the deputy chairman of the Nasserite Party. “Our country is at stake,” he told a crowd of political activists and former governmental officials in Cairo on Saturday. The opposition parties said they would form more alliances with local organisations and pressure groups in the future to convince the ruling party of the importance “of reforming Egypt's electoral system as one good step on the way of political reform”. Egypt's parliamentary elections are due to be held late this year. Some activists pin hopes on these elections to usher in a new order inside the legislature in a way that enables the opposition to field a candidate in the presidential polls, which are slated for 2011. Egypt's incumbent President Hosni Mubarak, now recuperating in Germany after undergoing gallbladder surgery,has yet to say if he would run for a sixth six-year term in office. But the opposition says the current Constitution, which has only underwent minor amendments over the last 39 years, restricts candidacy in the presidential elections to a limited group of people, while the rest of the citizens of this country are denied the right to run in the elections. “The current Constitution puts all powers in the hands of the President,” said Ibrahim Darwish, a leading legal expert. “We don't need to amend this Constitution, but actually to get rid of it entirely to pave the way for a new constitution,” he told The Egyptian Gazette Online in an interview. This, however, is a point of contention between Egypt's opposition and the National Democratic Party, which has ruled here for more than three decades since Egypt's political party system was revived at the end of the 1970s. Commenting on demands for constitutional amendments by the opposition, Secretary-General of the ruling party Safwat el-Sherif said the Constitution was in need of no more amending. “This Constitution opened the way for multi-candidate presidential polls for the first time in the history of this country,” el-Sherif said during a recent party meeting, before adding that presidential hopefuls who did not belong to political parties could run in the elections as independents. Perhaps el-Sherif had former chief of the atomic energy watchdog Mohamed ElBaradei in mind when he made these statements. ElBaradei, who has support from most of the political parties, which met in Cairo yesterday, has been pushing for political reform for weeks now. He did not say whether he wanted to run for president, but insisted that political reform would open the way for solving most of Egypt's economic and social problems. This was actually the message the members of this alliance of opposition parties were keen to deliver. They said food was inseparable from fair elections. “Fair elections have always been an exception in the history of this country,” said Hussein Abdel Razik, the Secretary- General of the leftist Al-Tagammu Party. “Most of our parliaments never express the real desires of the electorate in our country,” he added.
