The Skeptic الشكاك

583 NDP High Jinks

Stage-managing an election is hard work, and even the best-oiled political and patronage machine is bound to cough and sputter a bit when more than ten thousand sinecures are up for grabs in local councils around the country.

Fortunately, the opposition is illegal or irrelevant. This simplifies things some, allowing would-be candidates and their supporters to be arrested by the hundreds in dawn raids or simply excluded from the ballot on security grounds. (The MB says more than 800 members are in jail now, including 148 would-be candidates.) Activist judges complicate things in the cases of, well, 2,664 candidates improperly disqualified from running, but you can tie up their rulings in delay tactics until after the election. And while the illegal opposition is resourceful, they’re also illegal, which makes them Security’s problem. It’s the parvenus, the venal local bigwigs, and the endless squabbles over money that’ll really kill you.

Last week, four members of parliament from Egypt’s ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) resigned to protest the party’s decision not to list their supporters as candidates in the April local council elections.

The four, all from industrial towns in the Nile Delta, are Abd al-Maqsud al-Said (representing Mit Ghamr in the Shura Council), Hussein Awad (People’s Assembly), Walaa al-Husseini (Mansoura, People’s Assembly), and Magdi al-Bisati (Damietta, People’s Assembly).

The next day, Safwat al-Sharif, secretary general of the NDP, held emergency meetings with the four, and managed to get Abd al-Maqsud to take back his resignation. This must have been quite a task: one of the NDP candidates from Abd al-Maqsud’s native Mit Ghamr who did make it on the ticket, Mohammed Ali Hussein Yussef, had been, as of last week, in prison since February 24 on charges of forging his nomination papers. Perhaps Abd al-Maqsud was convinced by the argument that if the Brothers can say they will field candidates from prison, there’s no reason why the NDP shouldn’t as well.

The four MPs were the tip of the iceberg: according to some press accounts, thousands of rank-and-file members have also resigned from the party in recent weeks. The acrimony has become violent. On February 17, supporters of al-Bisati’s favored candidate and his rival drew knives and threw furniture at each other at a party convention in Damietta.

When Al-Bisati’s favored candidate didn’t get on the ticket, he told al-Misry al-Youm that he had resigned because the party’s secretary in Damietta was “running the party like a private business.”

This is taking all this talk about transparency and accountability a little too far. One doesn’t talk about candidates’ bribing their way to office in public. Criminal libel laws take care of that. The outbid apparatchick may be frustrated, but that doesn’t mean he may shoot off his mouth to the press.

Elsewhere, there were mundane organizational problems. In the Cairo district of Al-Salam and the Delta town of Belqas, for example, it briefly appeared that miscalculations had led to Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated candidates winning uncontested seats. New NDP candidates were hastily approved, after the deadline. It wasn’t immediately clear on what legal grounds.

None of this points to a fundamental disintegration of the NDP. In any undertaking of this size, there are bound to be some slip-ups. But it does lead one to wonder if the expense, hassle, and arrest campaign are really worth it. It would surely be simpler to appoint the local councils.

More:
109 New Resignations from NDP in Giza and al-Sharqiyya over Local Council Elections (Al-Misry al-Youm, March 24, Arabic)

2 Comments »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

1. […] elections, four members of parliament from Egypt’s ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) began protesting the party’s decision not to list their supporters as […]

   Pingback by Welcome | Project on Middle East Democracy — March 25, 2008 #

2. […] been making a lot of fuss over those cases in which Egypt’s ruling National Democratic Party […]

   Pingback by The Skeptic ?????? » Congratulations — April 4, 2008 #

Leave a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.

I'm Reading: