Preparations for Egypt’s forthcoming parliamentary elections will soon get underway, with judge Ahmed Al-Bendari, executive director of the National Elections Authority (NEA) which is in charge of supervising the polls, telling the media on Monday that “the NEA has already started to lay the groundwork for the House of Representatives elections and will announce the timetable for the poll next week.”
The door for candidate registration will likely open in the second half of October, and the ballot will be held in two stages in November and December. The first stage is expected to include 14 governorates and the second 13.
Voters will elect 284 MPs via the individual candidacy system and 284 through the closed list system. An additional 28 (five per cent) will be appointed by the president, and 25 per cent of the total number of House seats (125) are reserved for women.
The law redrawing the House’s electoral constituencies passed by parliament on 25 May delineates 143 constituencies for individual candidates and four large constituencies for closed party lists. The law divides the 143 individual seats among Egypt’s 27 governorates, with Cairo at the top with 19 constituencies and 31 seats.
The four party list constituencies will be Cairo and the Middle and South Delta (102 seats), North, Middle and South Upper Egypt (102 seats), the Eastern Nile Delta (40 seats), and Alexandria and the Western Delta (40 seats). Each list allocated 102 seats must include at least 51 women candidates, three Christian candidates, two candidates representing workers and farmers, two representing young people, one representing the physically disabled, and one representing expatriates.
The pro-government Mostaqbal Watan (Future of the Homeland) Party said it has held meetings with representatives from 12 political parties — Mostaqbal Watan, Homat Watan (Protectors of the Homeland), the National Front, the People’s Republican Party, the Reform and Development Party, the Egyptian Socialist Democratic Party, the Adl (Justice) Party, the Wafd Party, the Tagammu Party, the Congress Party, the Egyptian Freedom Party, and the Will of a Generation Party — with the objective of forming a coalition to contest the party list seats.
Informed sources within Mostaqbal Watan said the party’s successful experience in forming a national coalition that was able to win the Senate’s 100 party list seats had encouraged its leaders to follow the same course with the House elections.
Controversy, however, has erupted in recent days over the criteria for selecting individual and party list candidates for the House elections.
Hanan Sharshar, head of the Homat Watan Party’s Women’s Secretariat, sparked widespread controversy in political circles recently after she spoke in a video posted on social media about “being subjected to financial pressure within the Party to pay a bribe of LE25 million in order to be allowed to run as Homat Watan’s official candidate.”
In response, Ahmed Bahaa Shalabi, head of the Homat Watan parliamentary bloc, denied the allegations in a TV interview, claiming that the criteria for selecting party candidates are based on competence, experience, and popularity in the district, not money.
“Some candidates bear the costs of the election campaigns themselves, while others are funded through internal donations, and so the matter has nothing to do with ‘selling seats,’” Shalabi said.
He indicated that the party will announce the names of its candidates for individual and list seats within days, and “we hope to win no fewer than 120.” He stressed that all the candidates will be notified before the election timetable is announced so they can complete their registration paperwork before submitting it to the NEA.
The Homat Watan Party currently holds 18 seats in the House of Representatives.
Although Mostaqbal Watan, which held a majority in the House in the previous elections, announced early last month the formation of a committee to select candidates, it held a meeting last Wednesday with the party’s members in all the governorates to discuss the criteria for selecting candidates.
Mostaqbal Watan Secretary-General Ahmed Abdel-Gawad emphasised that “the criteria for selecting the party’s candidates for the parliamentary elections are based on popular support, good reputation, and competence in performing the legislative and oversight roles within the parliament. We are also making sure that our candidates truly represent all segments of the Egyptian people.”
Mostaqbal Watan won 316 seats in the 2020 parliamentary elections, representing 54 per cent of the vote.
Nagi Al-Shehabi, head of the Democratic Generation Party, told Al-Ahram Weekly that “the crisis over candidate selection criteria emerged as a result of the lack of political figures capable of gaining citizens’ trust.”
“A lot of people are ready to pay money to run on the Unified National List because they believe that this is the list that will win the elections, especially if there are no other competitive lists, as we saw in the Senate elections,” Al-Shehabi said.
He revealed that a coalition of seven political parties — called the Free National Coalition — will be formed to contest the elections in the four party list-based constituencies. “We hope the House polls will be different from those for the Senate which saw no competition at all,” Al-Shehabi said, adding that “we also hope that a large number of candidates from all ideological backgrounds will run for the individual seats so that we can have a forceful and democratic parliament.”
“The current parliament is weak, and so we need a new parliament that can perform its legislative and oversight roles, and this will come about only through competitive and democratic elections,” he said.
The National Front Party, which was formed in December 2024 and was able to win 21 seats in the Senate elections, said it was still coordinating with Mostaqbal Watan and other major political parties regarding the formation of the Unified National List.
“Just like we coordinated together ahead of the Senate elections, we, the 12 political parties, will form a coalition to contest the House’s 284 party list seats,” said National Front Party Secretary for Parliamentary Affairs Soliman Wahdan.
Regarding the individual candidacy system, Wahdan explained that the party will field between 50 and 60 candidates.
Leftist political parties are also mulling the possibility of forming an electoral coalition. The Civil Democratic Movement, an opposition coalition comprising several parties and public figures, held a meeting this week to discuss the names of the movement’s candidates for the individual seats.
Mustafa Kamel Al-Sayed, Secretary-General of the Civil Movement and a professor of political science at Cairo University, indicated that “the movement will compete for the individual seats despite its rejection of the current electoral system and its concerns about the lack of minimum requirements for a fair electoral process and of equal media coverage for all the candidates.”
The opposition Conservative Party and the Dostour (Constitution) Party, which are part of the Civil Movement, announced last week that they will form the Free Path Alliance to contest the upcoming parliamentary elections.
According to a statement released last Friday, the alliance has been launched at a “critical moment in the history of the nation amidst complicated crises and threats that affect every home and burden every citizen.”
“We, the Conservative Party and the Constitution Party, announce the launch of the Free Path Alliance to contest the House elections for individual seats.”
“We hope that this alliance will renew hope in a political path that has become narrow and in a will to revitalise political life after years of stagnation. We hope that the elections will be fair and free from political money and vote-buying,” the alliance said.
The Free Path Alliance deplored the fact that the National Dialogue held in 2023 and 2024 to reform political life and the electoral system in Egypt has reached a deadlock.
“Our proposals through this dialogue to build a new democracy based on free speech and liberal political life have been marginalised and ignored in favour of recycling old formulas,” said a statement, adding that “despite this setback, we have chosen not to withdraw and have decided to offer an alternative, being a Free Path to truly represent the Egyptian people.”
* A version of this article appears in print in the 2 October, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
Short link: