Egypt dials back political reform

Constitutional amendments, expected to pass Monday, will bar the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's most popular opposition group.

from the March 26, 2007 edition

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Key changes include the removal of independent judicial oversight of elections in favor of an election monitoring commission that will be created along guidelines laid out later by parliament. The changes also ban any party organized around religion, a measure designed to bar the Muslim Brotherhood, the most popular opposition movement. Allies of the regime say that the measure will preserve the secular character of the state.

The motivation for the amendments, charges Rabab al-Mehdi, a professor at the American University in Cairo and a democracy activist, is to "facilitate the ascendancy of Gamal Mubarak to power and ... to curtail the potential rise of any strong confrontational opposition."

Gamal Mubarak is the president's son, and his meteoric rise in the NDP has led many Egyptians to presume that he is his father's preferred successor.

Analysts say that a number of factors have conspired to cause the US to back away from its former uncompromising democracy rhetoric: its urgent need to stabilize Iraq, the desire to drum up support to find a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, discomfort with the fact that most of the region's opposition movements have a strong Islamist tinge, and worries about containing Iran.

Meanwhile, regimes like Egypt's are making changes that amount to a more sophisticated version of the closed politics they've long enjoyed.

The amendments "constitute an effort by the Egyptian regime to increase the appearance of greater balance among the branches of government and of greater opportunities for political parties, while in fact limiting real competition strictly and keeping power concentrated in the hands of the executive branch and the ruling party,'' Nathan Brown, Michele Dunne and Amr Hamzawy wrote in a note for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

In Egypt's last elections, vote-buying and intimidation were widespread. The organization that represents the judges has urged a boycott of Monday's referendum.

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