EGYPT’S OLDEST political party has threatened to boycott next month’s parliamentary election after state television refused to broadcast campaign messages.
Wafd party spokesman Muhammad Sherdi said it would boycott if “the government’s obstinacy towards the party . . . continues”.
He said Wafd advertisements had been rejected because they were not approved by the election committee. The liberal, nationalist Wafd, founded in 1918, is set to field 250 candidates for the 508 elected seats in the expanded people’s assembly. Although Wafd won only six seats in the 454-member parliament in the 2005 election, the party’s withdrawal from the current race would undermine the assembly’s legitimacy.
Abstention would also constitute an about-face for the party which had refused to join a boycott called by Muhammad ElBaradei, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Following his retirement last year, Mr ElBaradei returned to Egypt and established a reform movement which has not registered as a party.
Wafd’s announcement coincided with the declaration by Egypt’s largest opposition movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, that 70 of its members had been arrested this week for hanging election posters in Alexandria.
The posters bore the Koranic assertion “God is Great” rather than the election-commission- approved slogan, “Islam is the Solution”, used by independents backed by the brotherhood, which is banned as a political movement.
This was the second round of brotherhood arrests, bringing the total to more than 200. The government has also initiated a crackdown on the media. In the 2005 election, brotherhood candidates won 88 seats, surprising the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP). In this campaign the brotherhood is set to field candidates for a third of the seats but is expected to win 10-15.
The NDP – founded in 1978 by President Anwar Sadat, slain after signing a peace treaty with Israel – regards this election as a test of strength ahead of next year’s presidential poll. Party officials have suggested that President Hosni Mubarak, who is 82 and ailing, could stand for a sixth term. While he has groomed his younger son, Gamal, for the post, the NDP and the influential military are divided over the succession.
