Following two-week parliamentary elections, the new People's Assembly will open today, 13 December. At the opening, Fathi Sorour, in all probability, will be re-elected Assembly speaker. Zeinab Radwan and Abdel-Aziz Mostafa, two veteran National Democratic Party (NDP) members, will be elected deputy speakers. Sorour, Radwan and Mostafa were nominated to the posts in a meeting held by the NDP with its chairman, President Hosni Mubarak, on 12 December.
Sorour will retain the position he has occupied for 20 years despite widespread rumours he was to be replaced by Moufid Shehab, minister of state for parliamentary affairs.
If Sorour's re-election as speaker appears to be a foregone conclusion, pressure is mounting on the ruling NDP to change the chairmen of many of the Assembly's 29 committees. The NDP chairmen of eight parliamentary committees were all returned to the Assembly; six lost their seats, while the remaining either abstained from running in the elections or were appointed by presidential decree.
The six NDP committee chairmen who are no longer MPs and should be replaced by others in tomorrow's procedural sitting are: Sherif Omar (Education), Hamdi El-Sayed (Health), Ali Gohar (Sports and Youth), Ahmed Abu Taleb (Culture and Tourism), Maher El-Derbi (Local Administration), Mostafa El-Said (Economic Affairs).
Of around 35 prominent businessmen who won seats in the elections, three are expected to retain their posts as chairmen of key economic committees. These are Ahmed Ezz (Budget Committee), Mohamed Abul-Enein (Industry Committee), Tarek Talaat Mostafa (Housing Committee). Other businessmen are vying to win other key committees. Foremost among these are Mansour Amer, owner of Amer Group for Tourist Development, who aims to be chairman of the Tourism Committee, while Abdel-Rahman Baraka, a banking mogul, seeks to be the chairman of the Economic Affairs Committee.
The predominance of businessmen in the coming Assembly led some opposition forces dub it “Ezz's Assembly”, after flamboyant mogul Ahmed Ezz, the NDP's secretary for organisational affairs. Ezz, who faces a long-running hostile press campaign from opposition forces who see him as the man who manipulated the parliamentary elections in the NDP's favour, has been chairman of the parliament's Budget Committee since 2000 and is widely viewed as the NDP's third man, after President Mubarak and his younger son Gamal who heads the NDP's influential Policies Committee.
Opposition forces, who staged a large demonstration in front of the prosecutor-general's office in downtown Cairo yesterday, also charge that Ezz's machinations resulted in a toothless Assembly without an opposition. When the Assembly holds its procedural session on 13 December, its make-up will include a sweeping 420 NDP MP majority (84 per cent), up from 71 per cent in the outgoing Assembly. The party-based opposition and independent MPs' share of the Assembly's seats has dropped from 124 (or 25 per cent) in the outgoing Assembly to 84, or around 17 per cent. Not to mention that at least 50 independents are originally NDP members who decided to run independently. This makes the NDP's combined majority — including official and independent NDP MPs — climb to 470 MPs, or around 96 per cent of parliament.
Worse still, official MPs of the political opposition parties are unprecedentedly low. The number of party-based opposition MPs stood at 15 but has dropped to 14 after Abdel-Aziz Shaaban, a veteran MP of the leftist Tagammu Party who won the seat of east Cairo's district of Hadayek El-Qubba, died last Thursday. The Tagammu now holds four seats, while three low-profile opposition parties — the Geel (generation), the Adalah (social justice) and Al-Salam (social peace) hold one seat each. The main opposition Wafd Party notified parliament last week that the membership of seven of its MPs who won in the election were frozen and that none of these MPs should be allowed to be its spokesmen in parliament. This will bring the number of party-based opposition MPs to its lowest number decades, at just seven.
While producing his Assembly membership card on Saturday, Ezz refused to comment on the results of the elections, arguing that “it is too early to judge these elections.”
In light of the fact that the newly-elected parliament suffers from almost “zero opposition”, many believe that the so-called NDP-independents will form a kind of opposition from within NDP ranks to act as a surrogate for the aggressive Muslim Brotherhood and leftist firebrand MPs from the outgoing Assembly.
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