Succession not on Mubarak agenda

Nadia Abou el Magd
Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: November 04. 2009 12:20AM UAE / November 3. 2009 8:20PM GMT

CAIRO // Members of the ruling National Democratic Party emphasised issues of social justice at their sixth annual convention this week and vowed that next year’s legislative elections will be “free and fair”.

They avoided, however, having a substantial discussion on who will succeed the current president and whether his son could inherit power, an issue that dominates the country’s political scene.

“Only for you” was the slogan for this year’s three-day conference, which ended on Monday night, and it was prominent on the countless party signs put up throughout the streets of Cairo.

Dissenters had earlier spray-painted some of the signs with alternative slogans like “No to the inheritance of power” and “Egypt is not a family farm”, though these had been removed by Sunday.

Neither President Hosni Mubarak, 81, nor his youngest son, Gamal, 45, addressed the succession issue in their speeches during the conference.

When asked by a reporter at a press conference on Sunday following his speech who the NDP candidate for the 2011 presidential election would be, Gamal Mubarak replied: “Do you speak Arabic? Did you listen to my responses before?

“In the party we have a clear system through which the party candidate is selected. We are not obliged, two years in advance, to say who the party candidate will be.”

Because of the president’s age and Gamal Mubarak’s imposing presence in Egypt’s domestic and foreign affairs, there is much speculation about – and much opposition to – the possibility of Mr Mubarak succeeding his father upon the latter’s retirement or death.

Although the Mubaraks avoided discussion of succession they did strongly defend the party against various other criticisms, including that it is too business-oriented and detached from the needs of ordinary Egyptians.

“We are not a party of slogans, like the others,” said Gamal Mubarak, who is the head of the NDP’s influential policy committee. “We are not party of businessmen, but a party of investment.”

Mr Mubarak, an investment banker, joined his father’s party in 2002. He has been the driving force behind the liberal economic reforms Egypt has undertaken in recent years and chose many of the ministers with business backgrounds who have been appointed since 2004.

“Gamal Mubarak is the man behind the modernity and development revolution in the party,” Ahmed Ezz, a steel magnate, chairman of the party’s membership committee and the main financier of the party, said in his speech at the conference on Saturday.

President Mubarak also expressed his trust in the younger generation of the party, which analysts say is Gamal Mubarak’s support base.

President Mubarak has been in power since 1981. He introduced and won the first multi-candidate presidential elections in 2005.

The next elections are scheduled for the end of 2011. “I believe that institutions stay, while people go,” he said in his speech to the conference on Saturday. “The constitution is the guarantee and it is above all.”

There are 24 political parties in Egypt, including the NDP. Egypt’s strongest opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, is technically illegal, and its candidates run as independents.

Mr Ezz waged a harsh attack on the Brotherhood when in his speech on Saturday he called it “a fanatical group that uses religion as a pretence”.

President Mubarak and several senior NDP officials said next year’s legislative elections would be a “fierce battle” but vowed that they would be “free and fair”.

Such elections have in the past been marred by vote-rigging, violence and the prevention of voters casting their ballots for Brotherhood candidates.

The president said the NDP’s agenda is “pro the poor majority” and insisted that developing shanty areas and eradicating poverty were “our top priorities. The Egyptian peasant is high on our agenda, as well as water and sewage problems”.

He also raised a number of challenges facing the country. He noted that Egypt is the No 1 importer of wheat in the world though it struggles to feed much of the population. Egypt’s rapidly growing population, which is putting further strain on the country’s limited resources, “is the most serious threat to our future”, he said.

Egypt’s population exceeds 80 million, half of whom live below the poverty line, according to the World Bank.

After the conference, critics said the NDP was corrupt, out of touch and in decline. “The NDP, which is more of a club of businessmen, is becoming more defensive due to the growing opposition mood in Egypt,” said journalist Wael Abdel Fattah.

Ahmed Awaad, an unemployed man in his 30s who was passing by one of the NDP posters near to the convention centre in eastern Cairo, questioned the NDP’s slogan, “Only for you”. “If this year’s slogan is for us, ordinary citizens, who has the NDP been working for for the past 30 years?”

nmagd@thenational.ae