In Egypt Vote, Mubarak-Era Figures return

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has touted upcoming parliamentary elections as the final phase in a new democratic transition here, but early indications signal the new legislature will resemble Egypt’s autocratic past.

Loyalists and associates of former President Hosni Mubarak , who ruled Egypt sternly for nearly 30 years, stand out among the candidates running in the March vote since registration officially began on Sunday.

The diversity of candidates will be limited, with several reform-minded parties boycotting the vote and Egypt’s oldest and largest opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, blocked from participating after Mr. Sisi’s government outlawed it.

All that has raised concerns among Egypt’s progressive parties that Mr. Sisi, who headed military intelligence under Mr. Mubarak, will face little opposition in a legislature set to be filled with lawmakers sympathetic to his government.

“The greatest screenwriter would not have been able to envision the reality we are living in a piece of dramatic work,” began an article published in the newspaper, Al Watan, on Sunday that listed more than 100 members of Mr. Mubarak’s dissolved National Democratic Party running for Parliament. Al-Ahram, the flagship state newspaper, counted more than 200 former NDP member candidates for the vote, to be held in two phases beginning March 22.

Public reaction to the return of these people as candidates has been muted, with pockets of outrage in an elite but increasingly small circle of so-called revolutionaries. Enthusiasm for the elections is low, with many Egyptians treating the vote less as a competitive contest than as a formality.

Party leaders say the vote is a throwback to an era of elections when powerful businessmen and influential local leaders won votes through patronage networks. “There is a strong tendency to tighten the political field and restrict it to those with influence and money,” the Constitution Party, founded by Nobel Prize Laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, said last week announcing it wouldn’t participate in the parliamentary election.

Many of these re-emergent Mubarak associates were criminally prosecuted after the leader’s 2011 ouster, only to have their cases thrown out as public enthusiasm for accountability waned amid a tumultuous and often violent transition.

Among them is Ahmed Ezz, a longtime Mubarak ally and close associate of his son, Gamal, who was being groomed to take over the presidency.

Mr. Ezz, a former steel tycoon and NDP secretary-general, was arrested shortly after Mr. Mubarak stepped down and charged with corruption, becoming a symbol for the sense of accountability that followed the regime’s fall. Mr. Ezz spent three years in prison after a conviction but was released in August after winning an appeal.

Hazem Rizakana, a lawyer for Mr. Ezz, declined to comment but confirmed his client was running for Parliament.

Mr. Ezz’s candidacy is emblematic of the setbacks that a slew of parties that advocate reform have recently faced. Many of them supported the military coup that ousted Egypt’s first freely elected president, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi, and were initially rewarded with cabinet positions under an interim government in 2013. But they have since been elbowed out of the political landscape in favor of holdovers from the Mubarak era, party officials say.

Mr. Sisi has described these figures as experienced lawmakers with the political acumen to help steer Egypt through a difficult period.

As Mr. Sisi consolidates his power, the prospects of rolling back edicts he enacted during his seven months in office appear unlikely. The 2014 constitution says the new Parliament must approve or reject such decrees within 15 days of convening or they become law. They can be declared unconstitutional only by the judiciary, a body that has shown little resistance to Mr. Sisi’s rule.

Mr. ElBaradei’s Constitution party joined a growing list of parties that have already boycotted the election in protest of a new law governing the vote, which they say is unfair because it favors individual candidates over fixed party lists, which tend to benefit smaller parties. The law was created by Egypt’s cabinet, led by Prime Minister Ibrahim Mahlab, a former NDP leader.

The Popular Current, a party led by former presidential candidate Hamdeen Sabahi, said the law was rigged against “free and fair participation.”

Faried Zahran, a senior official with the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, said his party would contest the election despite what he said was the electoral law’s flaws.

Mr. Zahran said the dominance of individual candidates will re-create legislatures that characterized the Mubarak era, where checking the power of the executive took a back seat to maintaining “good relations with the regime to keep money flowing to their districts.”

The electoral law calls for 420 of the 567 seats to be filled by individual candidates, with 120 elected through fixed party lists and 27 appointed by Mr. Sisi. The system, with its much larger allotment to individuals than the previous 2011 vote, will allow Mubarak associates whose NDP party was outlawed an advantage by allowing them to run without a declared party affiliation.

Parties that support the regime have begun to position themselves in coalitions seeking a legislative majority.

One alliance, calling itself For The Love of Egypt, is led by a former military intelligence general—the division Mr. Sisi once headed. The coalition brings together some of the political forces that most actively supported Mr. Morsi’s ouster, including the civilian face of the coup, Tamarod, and is considered an early favorite to win a large number of seats.

The urgency to form coalitions has begun a period of jockeying over parties whose influence appeared to wane after 2011 as Islamist parties, including the Brotherhood, dominated a parliamentary vote in 2011 that was annulled by court order on a technicality.

The Conference Party, a small party established by Mubarak-era diplomat and former head of the Arab League Amr Moussa, recently became the subject of a bidding war between two emerging alliances, party officials said. The party eventually joined the Al Wafd coalition, which is preparing to put forth hundreds of candidates.

Omar Somedah, a former navy captain who is the Conference Party’s president, said the coalition can’t avoid fielding candidates from the former NDP, which claimed three million members, but would put forward only those “whose names are untainted and who are demanded by the voters in their districts.”

The Egyptian National Movement, which is led by Ahmed Shafiq, the last prime minister to serve under Mr. Mubarak, heads the Egyptian Front Coalition. Mr. Shafiq, who lost to Mr. Morsi by a narrow margin in 2012 presidential election, won’t run in the parliamentary vote because he is in the United Arab Emirates, where he fled to after being indicted on graft charges following his loss. He has since been acquitted in cases that also included Mr. Mubarak’s sons and is awaiting formal permission to return to Egypt.

Though Mr. Shafiq will hold no formal elected office, his party said he would retain a role of leadership with the party, which alone expects to field 200 candidates.

Yahia Kadry, the vice president of the party, disputed a widely held notion that his party is a rebranded NDP but didn’t conceal that prospective parliamentarians from his coalition intended to act “in harmony” with Mr. Sisi.

“Our program is continue what is in progress now,” he said. “We believe the president’s program is working for Egypt.”

Source: The Wall Street Journal