Jonathan Manthorpe
Sharp division between parties will make its first task of writing constitution very challenging
If the raucous posturing that marked the opening session of Egypt’s first freely elected parliament is a taste of things to come, the assembly’s first task will be a quarrelsome business.
If the raucous posturing that marked the opening session of Egypt’s first freely elected parliament on Monday is a foretaste of things to come, the assembly’s first task, to write a new constitution, is going to be a quarrelsome business.
The 508- seat parliament is dominated by Islamists, who won twothirds of the vote in elections this month.
But there are sharp divisions between Egypt’s oldest opposition party, the Muslim Brotherhood whose political wing, the Freedom and Justice Party, won 47 per cent of the seats, and the ultra- conservative Salafi Nour Party, which took 25 per cent of the vote.
The victory of the Brotherhood’s party is in part a reflection of the veneration in which the 84- year- old organization is held by very many of Egypt’s 85 million people. The party had been banned for most of the past eight decades.
Having been forced to operate as an underground organization, the Brotherhood is a tight and disciplined body that was better able to martial its resources for the election campaign than were the neophyte political parties born in the Arab Spring demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.
The domination of parliament by Islamic parties will be alarming to Egypt’s Coptic Christians, who make up about 11 per cent of the country’s population. The last year has already seen a wave of attacks on Coptic Christian churches.
The Nour Party believes the new constitution, which a parliamentary committee of 100 members should have ready for approval by public referendum ahead of presidential elections in June, must be dictated by Shariah Islamic law.
The Freedom and Justice Party, despite its base in puritanical Islam, is prepared to see a constitution that recognizes a divide between religion and the state.
But this willingness may not survive if the Brotherhood and its political wing see themselves being outflanked by Nour representing itself as the party of religious purists.
That split between the two was there for all to see on Monday when Nour members added an unscripted codicil to their oath to honourably serve the nation.
The first Nour MP to be sworn in, Mamdouh Ismail, added the words “... if not in contradiction with God’s doctrine” to his oath, and others followed suit.
Liberals and leftists — who won only 10 per cent of the vote despite forming the backbone of the popular uprising that started on Jan. 25 last year and led to the end of the three- decade dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak on Feb. 11 — responded by adding their own postscript to the oath. They pledged to serve the nation “... in accordance with the demands of the revolution.”
Some of the liberals also wore armbands with the legend “No to military trials,” a reference to the 12,000 civilians who have been tried by military courts since an interim junta took over the running of the country after Mubarak was deposed.
There is a good deal of suspicion that the military, which in one guise or another has been the true hub of power in Egypt since King Farouk was packed off into exile in 1952, does not intend to give up its central role.
All kinds of scenarios for the military to retain its independent responsibility for the security of the nation are being floated. They range from quiet but firm pressure on the parliamentarians writing the new constitution, through manipulation of the subsequent referendum, to simply ignoring the July deadline to hand over to the civilians once a president is elected.
Fearing that the parliament will become, like its predecessors in the past 60 years, merely a facade for continued military rule, liberals, leftists and youth groups plan rallies for Wednesday calling for an immediate end to the interim military council.
In some capitals, particularly in Israel and the U. S., the domination of the new Egyptian parliament and the writing of the constitution by Islamist parties is fulfilment of their worst nightmares.
Mubarak was a dictator, but he was an ally of Washington, and not only signed a peace treaty with Israel, but actively worked with the Israeli government to curb the activities of the radical Islamic Hamas group in Gaza.
Egypt now has a predominantly anti- Western parliament. And even if the peace treaty with Israel survives, it will likely only be as a piece of paper.