Egyptians head to the polls tomorrow to vote for their local councilors with little competition in store for President Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party.
Up for grabs are 52,000 seats in the country’s municipal elections and the ruling NDP is fielding a candidate for every single seat. Ninety percent of its candidates are standing unopposed, party members said.
Meanwhile, the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s largest opposition group, will only be fielding 20 candidates after a wide-ranging government crackdown left many would-be candidates behind bars or blocked from registering, said Mohammed Habib, the group’s deputy supreme leader.
The municipal elections rarely drew fierce competition in the past, but this year’s election will be the first since a 2005 constitutional amendment required independent candidates running for the presidency to secure the backing of municipal councilors.
They need the support of at least 10 elected members of every local council in at least 14 provinces for their nomination to stand.
Press reports have said only 700 out 1,700 members of the opposition liberal Al Wafd party were able to register, as well as some 400 members of the left-leaning Tagammu party amid complaints by opposition hopefuls of obstacles ranging from bureaucratic hurdles to physical assaults at registration stations.
The run up to elections saw one of the most intense crackdowns on members of the Muslim Brotherhood, with over 800 members of the group arrested in recent weeks.
The group says the government is eager to avoid another electoral setback after the Brotherhood won 20 percent of seats in parliament, where its members sit as independents due to their outlawed status.
Senior Brotherhood leader Essam al-Erian said the group’s candidate list was reduced from 5,754 to 498 members, prompting it to file 3,192 lawsuits demanding that candidates be reinstated on the ballots.
It won 2,664 of these cases.
“The government, however, has refused to honor the court rulings,” Erian wrote in an editorial posted on the group’s Web site.
“It has become clear that the National Democratic Party will not face any real competition in the upcoming elections,” he said.
International human-rights organizations have condemned the government’s crackdown against opposition candidates.
“This latest crackdown by the Egyptian authorities follows a longstanding pattern in which members and supporters of Muslim Brotherhood have been repeatedly subject to arbitrary arrest and detention in the run-up to elections,” Amnesty International said in a statement.
The New York-based group Human Rights Watch (HRW) has slammed the roundup as “shameless” and cast serious doubt on the election’s legitimacy.
“The ruling National Democratic Party heavily dominates the local councils, and President Mubarak seems determined to keep it that way, whatever the cost to his government’s legitimacy,” HRW’s Middle East director Joe Stork said in a statement.
“The regime is already preparing for the 2011 presidential election, by trying to limit as much as possible the Muslim Brotherhood representation at the local level,” said Mustafa Kamel al-Sayyed, a political science professor at the American University in Cairo.
Criticism also came from the White House last month.
“We are concerned by a continuing campaign of arrests in Egypt of individuals who are opponents of the current governing party and are involved in the upcoming local elections,” spokeswoman Dana Perino said.
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