More than 1,000 protesters from Cairo areas of Helwan, Tibin and May 15 demonstrated outside the Parliament Saturday against plans by the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) to abolish their electoral constituency and assign it to a new one. The protesters were joined by independent MP Moustafa Bakri, their recent representative at the People's Assembly (the Lower House of Egypt's Parliament). Bakri was carried on shoulders by some protestors who walked with him here and there. The demonstrators shouted slogans for more than three hours as they called on President Hosni Mubarak to intervene and shelve the proposal, stressing that it was nothing but a plan to exclude Bakri from the Parliament. "Whatever the NDP does, Bakri will be our representative," one protestor said as he was collecting his family with him in the protest. He added that he decided to join the protest because he loves Bakri, whom he described as "the most active MP in the history of Helwan". The proposal, which has been submitted to the People's Assembly, seeks approval from the ruling National Democratic Party to have the Helwan and Tibin constituency, which Moustafa represents, subsumed into Maadi. This would make Bakri's chances of getting a seat in the new Parliament very slim. Sympathetic protesters held banners that read: We are with you Bakri and Helwan will be a blaze without Bakri. They blamed Ahmed Ezz, a senior official of the NDP, for trying to exclude Bakri, who used to embarrass the Government by his parliamentary questions. Changes are expected to take place in the PA's constituencies across the nation, after a new law allocated 64 more seats for women. As the Shrua Council mid-term elections are set for June 1, the People's Assembly elections will be held in October and the presidential elections are scheduled for 2011. The proposed changes triggered a similar protest in the Giza governorate's area of Al-Warraq on Friday as the angry protesters closed the Cairo Ring Road, asking for their constituency to stay as it is. The road remained closed until the early hours Saturday when the police chief in Giza intervened and told the demonstrators, who also called for President Mubarak to help them, he would try to convey their demands to the officials concerned.
