The Al-Dostour Party announced Saturday four candidates as potential party chairmen as part of elections due to be held on 26 June. Elections will take place by direct vote, choosing between four candidates’ lists.
Former party president Hala Shukrallah declined to run for a second term. Contrary to speculation, her rival candidate in the 2013 elections Gameela Ismail is also not running for the position.
Each list comprises a candidate for the party’s presidency, another for the secretariat-general and a candidate for the position of treasurer. The four lists are competing against each other for one week, through electoral campaigns.
The four candidates for the party’s leadership are Mohamed El-Gamal, Ahmed Metwally, Tamer Gomaa and Ahmed Bayoumi. Their campaigns are respectively titled “Together we can”, “Why not”, “We will develop alternatives” and “Change comes through proper thinking”.
Prominent party figures, including Ismail and Khaled Daoud, are part of the “Together we can” campaign, supporting Mohamed El-Gamal as presidential candidate.
“They received the highest numbers of recommendations from the members of our campaign, and then they conducted additional discussions among them, which led to the final agreement on El-Gamal,” spokesperson for the campaign Samah Al-Ghazawy explained Sunday. Al-Ghazawy said that each campaign works independently and differently.
“For us, it took weeks of discussions on future visions and plans for the party, in addition to constructing a programme. Then all members were asked to suggest who they thought would be the best leader to implement that programme.”
Al-Dostour, a party with leftist tendencies, has been struggling with its internal structure, mainly because it was not built upon a specific ideology since its establishment by Mohamed El-Baradie, according to Shukrallah’s comments in a previous interview with Daily News Egypt.
