CAIRO: Egypt’s ruling party will run about 800 candidates for only 508 seats in a parliamentary poll, raising fears of a repeat of the last election’s violence as rivals within the same camp battle it out.
The official Al-Ahram newspaper reported on Tuesday that the National Democratic Party is to run 870 candidates in the Nov. 28 election, while another government daily, Rose Al-Youssef, put the number at 790.
Under the headline “The NDP’s bomb,” an article in Rose Al-Youssef said the NDP’s list “was very astonishing” and questioned why the party chose to field three or four candidates for the same seat in some constituencies.
A senior party official told the paper that the NDP was pursuing a “different election tactic” from Egypt’s last parliamentary poll in 2005.
Fielding a large number of candidates was aimed at allowing voters a choice without driving them to vote outside the party, the paper said.
“The party wants to meet calls for change without losing any of its seasoned cadres,” Rose Al-Youssef said.
“The test will be the ballot box. If none of the experienced cadres are elected, it would be the choice of the people,” it said.
But some would-be candidates who did not make the party’s list have threatened to back opposition candidates – including those of the banned Muslim Brotherhood, the independent Al-Masry Al-Youm paper said.
Hundreds of supporters of candidates who were not on the list held demonstrations and some candidates said they would support the Brotherhood, which plans to field 134 candidates as independents, the paper said.
MP hopefuls who made the party’s list have held festive processions that involved firing rounds into the air, a sign that placement on the list almost guarantees a seat in parliament, said analyst Amr El-Chobaki.
“These wildly festive demonstrations show that a candidate’s inclusion on the NDP’s list means that he has gone 90 percent of the way to winning,” said the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies analyst.
“That’s because the party is supported by the authorities and police, which is capable of intervening in elections in favor of the candidate,” he said.
“The NDP is part of the regime and therefore there is heated competition between the candidates for a place on the list, as opposed to opposition parties which have to search for candidates.”
Chobaki said the competition was bound to lead to in-fighting.
“It is a sign that these elections will be the worst and there will be violence and thuggery between the NDP candidates to a larger degree than what we saw in the last election,” he said.
About 17 people were killed in the last election five years ago, mostly in districts where NDP candidates who did not make the cut ran as independents.
“This election will witness competing interests between the many NDP candidates and money will play a big role through vote-buying, while politics will be absent,” said Chobaki.
Rights activists who intend on monitoring the elections agree with this view.
Rights groups “expect violence to center around constituencies where NDP candidates will compete against each other and perhaps also where they will compete with the Brotherhood,” Magdi Abdel Hamid, a member of a coalition of civil society groups, told a news conference on Tuesday.
In addition to the NDP and Brotherhood candidates, the liberal Wafd opposition party is to field about 200 candidates while the leftist Tagammu plans to contest 82 seats and the Nasserist party 48 seats.
Egypt’s electoral commission has until Nov. 14 to vet applications from the total of 5,720 candidates for the two rounds of voting on Nov. 28 and Dec. 5.
