CAIRO: The leftist Tagammu Party announced on Tuesday that it will nominate 80 candidates, including eight women, in the upcoming parliamentary election, scheduled for November.
The party’s general secretariat will hold a meeting on Saturday to announce the preliminary list of selected candidates which so far includes about 50.
This announcement comes a few months after the Kefaya Movement for Change called for boycotting the elections.
General Coordinator of the Kefaya Movement for Change, Abdel Halim Qandil, held several meetings with prominent opposition leaders in an attempt to persuade opposition groups to boycott the elections.
Mohamed ElBaradei, former head of the IAEA, stressed that there’s no point in participating in the upcoming People’s Assembly elections. The National Association for Change, founded by ElBaradei, also called for boycotting the elections.
Yet, such calls have fallen on deaf ears; Al-Wafd Party has announced earlier its participation in the elections.
General Secretary of Al Tagammu Party, Sayed Abdel-Aal, told Daily News Egypt the party still hasn’t made a decision on who to nominate in a large number of constituencies, because it has more than one potential candidate for each.
The central election commission of the party will hold elaborate discussions to settle this issue, he added.
Abdel-Aal dismissed the significance of the calls for election boycott.
He said his party’s decision to participate is an attempt to confront and change the political reality through active participation.
Al-Tagammu is trying to coordinate with members of other opposition parties during the elections to avoid a stand-off between opposition candidates in any of the electoral districts and to focus on competing with the National Democratic Party, he added.
