The now banned Muslim Brotherhood has presented an initiative for a proposed national reconciliation calling for a fresh presidential election describing it as “a way-out of the country’s lingering political crisis.”
This came in a statement issued by the group on the fifth anniversary of the dispersal of two major protest camps in support of former president Mohamed Morsi in 2013.
“The best way-out of this dark tunnel is the return of President Morsi to power to chair a coalition government agreed upon by national powers for a specific and sufficient period of time to prepare the country for a fair election supervised by an independent judicial entity…without exclusion of any party,” the group said.
Since the ouster of the Brotherhood-affiliated president Mohamed Morsi in August 2013 the government has not directly or openly proposed any reconciliation initiatives with the group and in December 2013 the cabinet declared the Brotherhood to be a terrorist organisation.
In September 2014 President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi once said that the Brotherhood’s supporters can participate in political life ‘if they renounce violence,” however in July 2018 Sisi said that “we are fighting terrorism relentlessly, and we are not conducting any communications or reconciliations.”
Several reconciliation initiatives have been proposed by prominent politicians such as Abdel Moneim Abul Fotouh who proposed holding a referendum to gauge approvals of the roadmap and Mohamed Selim Al-Awwa who proposed the appointment of a new prime minister who is ‘approved by everyone’ and has the powers of the president.
However, most initiatives were in vain.
After the Rabaa Al-Adaweya sit-in, then Interim prime minister Hazem El-Beblawi stressed the importance of reconciliation, but said there would be no reconciliation with those “whose hands were stained with blood or with those who pointed their guns at government institutions.”
El-Beblawi said the government made the decision to disperse the sit-ins after negotiations with former President Mohamed Morsi’s supporters failed.
