Egypt's new prime minister Hesham Qandil talks during a press conference in Cairo, Egypt, Thursday, Aug. 2, 2012. (Photo: AP)
Although Islamists do not dominate the newly-appointed cabinet, President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood were subjected to criticism over the choice of ministers when the names were released on Thursday.
It took Morsi and Prime Minister Hisham Qandil a few days to settle on the final selection of the permanent cabinet, which consists of 35 ministers, compared to 29 under his predecessor, Kamal El-Ganzouri.
Qandil’s government includes 29 technocrats (seven of whom served under El-Ganzouri), four ministers from the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, one minister from the moderate Islamist Al-Wasat Party, and one from the Salafist Al-Nahda Party.
Egyptian liberal thinker and head of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Developmental Studies, Saad Eddin Ibrahim said that though most ministers of the newly-formed cabinet are not part of Islamist movements, they are, still, representatives of a pro-Islamism current.
"Although they seem to be far less extremist than members of the movement itself, it is still too early to judge their performance," Ibrahim told state television on Thursday.
For his side, ex-presidential candidate and member of the dissolved parliament, leftist Abul-Ezz El-Hariri sarcastically commented on the newly-formed government.
"Did you expect anything else from the Muslim Brotherhood?" he said.
El-Hariri opined that the cabinet formation will follow a pro-Brotherhood agenda, "even if most of the ministers are not members of the Islamist group," reported Al-Ahram's Arabic website.
"The Brotherhood leadership will take Egypt into a dark tunnel with no clear vision for the future," he said.
A banned group under the old regime, the Brotherhood emerged as the most potent political force in Egypt after the 2011 uprising which toppled former president Hosni Mubarak.
Once denied political representation, the group realised their first objective by establishing the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) last year.
The FJP subsequently captured almost half the seats in the People's Assembly, the lower house of Egypt's parliament that was later dissolved on the orders of the military council.
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