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Appendix

Political Parties and Candidates

The ruling National Democratic Party, along with the much smaller leftist Tagammu` (Progressive Unionist) Party and conservative al-Ahrar (Liberal) Party, emerged from the dissolution by decree of the Arab Socialist Union in 1977. The NDP has held a virtual monopoly on formal political life in Egypt ever since, always controlling well over two-thirds of the 454-seat  People’s Assembly and the 264-member Consultative (Shura) Council, as well as all provincial and local councils and leadership positions.

NDP and government officials also control the Political Parties Committee, which determines whether new parties receive legal recognition. Over twenty-seven years, the Political Parties Committee approved two of the applications submitted and rejected sixty-three. The Political Parties Court, a special court set up to hear appeals to the committee’s rulings, reversed the committee and granted recognition in eight cases. This rejectionist stance of the committee changed only recently: On October 28, 2004 it approved the application of al-Ghad Party, after rejecting it on three earlier occasions. In mid-December the committee accepted the application of the Free Social Constitutional Party. Under a revised Political Parties Law passed in July 2005 by the parliament, its membership was expanded and altered to lessen the stranglehold of NDP members, but the revised law also expanded the committee’s power to suspend a party’s activities if it judges that its leaders espouse principles diverging from the approved platform or when the committee determines that suspension is in the national interest.

In May 2000 the Political Parties Committee froze the activities of al-`Amal (Labor) Party, originally a secular leftist but more recently Islamist opposition party, following violent street protests over the publication of a novel that the party’s newspaper had denounced as being offensive to Islam.

There are now twenty-one recognized parties, including two recognized in recent months. The parties represented in the current People’s Assembly are the NDP (404), al-Wafd (5), al-Tagammu` (6), Democratic Nasirist (1), and al-Ghad (6), along with thirty two independents, ten of whom are appointed by the president.

Al-WafdParty, the leading nationalist party under the monarchy, was dissolved along with all other political parties by decree of the military junta that took power in 1952. The reformed party (therefore also known as the New Wafd) gained legal approval in 1983. Al-Wafd initially aligned itself with the Nasirists and the Tagammu` to boycott the election, but subsequently broke ranks to participate. Some Egyptian observers interpret its decision to field a candidate in this election as a favor to President Mubarak in order to draw votes away from Ayman Nur, formerly with al-Wafd Party until he left four years ago to form al-GhadParty.

The Presidential Elections Commission excluded al-AhrarParty from the elections because two rival leaders claimed the right to run.

Among the candidates who can claim parties in name only is Ahmad al-Sabahi of the Umma (Islamic Nation) Party. Sabahi’s straightforward Islamist agenda does not seem to discomfort the Political Parties Committee despite the law forbidding parties based on religion (the ostensible grounds for banning the Muslim Brotherhood). Sabahi’s reputation lies in soothsaying and palm-reading rather than politics, and a book he published in 2004, Integrity in Leadership and Society won a LE 10,000 (about U.S. $1,700) prize from President Mubarak.

The full list of candidates is as follows: