CAIRO: The Muslim Brotherhood does not plan to heed calls for a boycott of November’s parliamentary elections, a senior member of the moderate Islamist movement said on Thursday.
"The official decision has still not been announced by the movement’s political bureau," but "the plan for the Muslim Brotherhood is to participate in the legislative elections as in all elections," the group’s spokesman Hamdy Hassan told AFP.
"We have said that we will boycott the vote if there is unanimity among the opposition parties on such a boycott, but this is not the case. Instead, the opposition parties are gradually announcing their planned participation, so the position of the Muslim Brotherhood is to do likewise."
Hassan said the group planned to field "at least 160 candidates" for the 508 seats being contested, with the number potentially rising to allow members to run for some of the 62 seats reserved for women.
But he warned that if the government ended up "falsifying" the vote there would be "unprecedented violence, because the people no longer fear the security services."
He also slammed a decision taken three years ago to replace the judges previously responsible for monitoring the polls with appointed officials.
The officially banned but tolerated Muslim Brotherhood clinched 20 percent of seats in the 2005 legislative polls by running as "independents," in a surprise win that commentators said rattled the ruling National Democratic Party.
Earlier this month Mohamed ElBaradei, the former UN nuclear chief turned Egyptian reformer, called for a boycott of the upcoming elections and warned of civil disobedience if demands for political reform are not met.
But the only other party to join him so far is the small Al-Ghad party, whose founder Ayman Nour came in a distant second to incumbent Hosni Mubarak in the 2005 presidential election.
Members of Egypt’s liberal Wafd party voted in favor of participating in the November elections at their general assembly on Friday, Sept 17, although 44 percent supported a boycott.
Widespread irregularities were reported during elections in June for the Egyptian parliament’s upper house, with the Muslim Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide Mohamed Badie saying security officials had removed posters of his movement’s candidates and prevented them from campaigning or meeting electors.
