Major General Refaat Komsan, election affairs advisor to Prime Minister Ibrahim Mehleb, said in an interview with Al-Shorouk that his committee cannot prevent certain factions, presumably including the Muslim Brotherhood, from joining this year’s parliamentary elections.

Komsan is a member of the committee charged with the preparation of the electoral process laws.

“We can’t tailor the laws to stop a certain faction from participating in the elections. However, the community will sort out who it wants to be represented by. Now it’s all about awareness and the electoral culture,” says Komsan.

Although there is currently no law that bans certain groups from participating in the next parliamentary election, Komsan said that the general public will only accept the Brotherhood if the group abandons their “extremist beliefs.”

“Reconciliation is for the general public to decide, as they are the ones who have suffered from bombs in the street, had their lives affected and had their best security officers assassinated,” Refaat Komsan told the newspaper on Wednesday, in an extended two-part interview.

Komsan also said that the current approach by the Muslim Brotherhood will only lead to the inevitable destruction of the group, adding that with such an approach the group will most certainly “go to hell.”

Last January, several political parties and revolutionary fronts called to ban the Muslim Brotherhood and "remnants of the old regime" from participating in the upcoming parliamentary elections.

In July 2014, a Cairo court overturned a political participation ban on former leaders of the National Democratic Party (NDP). Another court in April 2014 ordered the dissolution of assets owned by the Freedom and Justice Party, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood.  

Egypt has been without a parliament since June 2012 when a court dissolved the lower chamber after ruling it was not constitutionally elected.

El-Sisi ratified amendments to the election law that regulates electoral constituencies in July.

Earlier last July, Ibrahim Al-Heneidy, minister of parliamentary elections and transitional justice, said that the long-awaited vote might be held as early as September.