CAIRO: As Egyptians prepare to vote in elections for parliament s upper house on Monday, the opposition Muslim Brotherhood – the regime s main challenger in elections – has seen hundreds of members detained. The outcome of the elections for the Shoura Council, which has a purely consultative role, will hardly be a nail-biting event, observers say. Amid widespread apathy, only about 10 percent of voters are expected to turn out. Twenty seven million registered voters will be called to vote in both election rounds on June 11 and 18, according to the Higher Electoral Commission, which oversees elections. Of the Council s 264 seats, 132 are renewed every three years. Of the 665 candidates in the running, 88 are elected and 44 are appointed directly by President Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt for more than a quarter of a century. It is not so much a test which concerns the people, but a test between the regime and the Islamist opposition, said Emad Gad, a researcher at the Ahram Centre for Strategic and Political Studies. The ruling National Democratic Party is putting forward 109 candidates, with two candidates in most of the 67 constituencies in a battle between the old and the new guard, political scientist Amr Hisham Rabie told AFP. NDP members who did not qualify for the party list will run as independents and then join the party list if they win, creating a vast official and unofficial NDP list, Rabie said. Mubarak s party, which has vowed to give women a more prominent role in politics, is only putting forward one female candidate. Moreover, there are no Coptic Christian candidates on the NDP list, despite the fact that Egyptian Christians make up between six and 10 percent of the 76 million population. The country s main opposition parties, the liberal Wafd and the leftist Tagammu, have announced they will boycott the elections and will not be presenting candidates. Egypt s constitution, which is partly based on Sharia was amended in March to ban any political activity based on religion. But the amendments did nothing to deter the Muslim Brotherhood. The country s largest and best organized opposition movement, is has decided to defy the regime and field candidates as independents under the now illegal slogan Islam is the solution.
The group, which is officially banned, gained a shock 88 seats in the 2005 legislative elections, to control one fifth of parliament. Safwat Al-Sherif, speaker of the Shoura Council and Secretary General of the NDP, has warned the Muslim Brotherhood that it was ready to crack down on groups that defy the constitution and the law. The run-up to the elections has been marked by mass arrests of members of the Islamist group across the country, including two on Saturday, bringing the number of members arrested to 126 in one week, a security source told AFP. Mohammed Habib, the group s deputy supreme guide, said Friday on the group s website that 668 members are currently detained, including a group of 40 facing a military trial on charges of money laundering and financing a banned organization. The human rights group Amnesty International described the wave of arrests as a serious violation of freedom of expression. Mustafa Kamel Al-Sayyed, professor of political science at the American University in Cairo, told AFP that with only the NDP able to campaign, this uncompetitive election is not representative.
