CAIRO: Under the slogan "Our Egypt is our right", the April 6 Youth Movement launched a campaign targeting the leaders of the National Democratic Party (NDP) and ministers’ constituencies around Cairo.
The campaign aims to raise awareness of political, constitutional and legal rights, as well as to collect signatures supporting the "Together for Change," initiative which includes seven demands outlined by the former Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and reform advocate Mohamed ElBaradei.
The movement stated in its first campaign report published on Sunday that the campaign members visited the Cairo neighborhood of Sayeda Zeinab, the constituency of Parliament Speaker Ahmed Fathi Sorour, and the Sahel neighborhood in Shubra, the constituency of Egypt’s Minister of Finance, Youssef Boutros Ghali.
"The movement managed to collect around 5,000 signatures supporting ‘Together for change’ in the past couple of weeks in Cairo, Alexandria and Gharbeya," said the report, a copy of which was obtained by Daily News Egypt.
Coordinator of the April 6 movement, Mohamed Adel, told Daily News Egypt that "the movement intends to visit the constituencies of all the ministers and the National Democratic Party leaders, to expose their performance to the people and incite the voters not to vote for them in the coming parliamentary elections."
He added that the most prominent of these constituencies is the Amiriya district, the constituency of Presidential Chief of Staff Zakaria Azmy.
The movement said that it received a very warm welcome from the people.
"We met a large number of young people and ordinary citizens who were already informed about the demands of the National Association for Change and about the ‘Our Egypt, Our Right’ campaign," the movement said, adding that their lack of access to the internet prevented them from endorsing the initiative online.
“They [the people] insisted on having copies of the statement and collecting signatures themselves in their residential district and household,” said Adel.
He added, however, that some of the members of April 6 were harassed by police in the process.
"Two members were detained in Sahel police department on Saturday [July 31] for an hour and a half and all the signatures they had collected were confiscated," he said.
