Nour Party to announce election decision on Sunday
Ahram Online , Saturday 23 Feb 2013
Salafist Nour Party has reservations about date of parliamentary election, would have preferred consensus on start date among political groups, spokesperson Nader Bakkar says


Salafist Nour Party leaders will meet on Sunday to decide their plans for the upcoming parliamentary election, party spokesperson Nader Bakkar has said.

The Nour Party has reservations about the election dates and would have preferred all political groups to reach a consensus on the appropriate date before the decision was made by the president, Bakkar told state news agency MENA on Saturday.

On Thursday, the presidential office said elections for the House of Representative (parliament's lower chamber, formerly known as the People's Assembly) would begin on 27 April.

In the 2011 parliamentary poll, the Nour Party list won the second highest number of votes (24.22 percent), behind the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party list.

Mohamed ElBaradei, leader of the Constitution Party and founding member of the National Salvation Front (NSF), on Saturday called on Egyptians to boycott the parliamentary poll.

On 19 February, the Popular Current, led by former presidential candidate Hamdeen Sabbahi, another founding member of the NSF, announced that it would be boycotting the poll.

While both leaders of the National Salvation Front (NSF), Egypt’s biggest opposition bloc, have announced their intention to boycott the election, no official statement has been made by the NSF.

On 12 January, the NSF issued eleven conditions to ensure the transparency of the electoral process. The front said that it would boycott the poll if the conditions were not met.

The Nour Party recently cooperated with the NSF to launch an initiative aiming to create a consensus amongrival political groups. The initiative proposed the formation of a national unity government and the dismissal of the prosecutor-general.

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