Vice President Mahmoud Mekki reaffirmed to journalists that the constitutional referendum would take place on time as clashes took place outside the presidential palace.
Mekki announced an initiative for consensus regarding the constitution in a Wednesday press conference.
The vice president called on opposition groups and parties to gather and list the constitutional articles they object to, and then propose constitutional amendments to the parliament scheduled for election after the referendum.
He said he rejected the constitutional decree as a judge, but as the vice president he knows and understands President Mohamed Morsy’s motivations.
Mekki expressed dismay at seeing what he called “partners in the revolution” fighting. He suggested that money smuggled out of Egypt by former regime officials was “now being pumped back in to create chaos.”
He said the fact that the Constituent Assembly completed the proposed constitution draft so soon after Morsy’s decree, despite him extending their deadline by two months, was proof that “there was no coordination between the president and the assembly.”
Reading and voting on all the articles in one meeting is a constitutional tradition followed everywhere, he added.
Mekki said he was upset at the sight of crowds at the Supreme Constitutional Court but that “judges were used to making verdicts under these conditions by now.”
The press conference was opened by Presidential Spokesperson Yasser Ali, who said the presidency monitored the situation around the palace on Tuesday and ordered the police to assume “the most extreme levels of self discipline,” which he said they did.
Ali said the presidency acknowledged the right of all to peaceful protest but that protestors had damaged cars of some palace employees “who are Egyptian citizens with rights too.”
As Mekki spoke, hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood members and Morsy supporters stormed the sit-in outside the palace, taking down tents, beating protestors and taking supplies, according to eyewitness reports and footage from the scene.
The sit-in was started after tens of thousands marched to the palace yesterday in protest at the constitutional decree and the proposed constitution.
