Egypt's paper parties are in the wind .. And what benefit from the rest?

Abdullah Hamed - Cairo

More than a hundred parties do not know most of the Egyptians most of them, and do not see them as useful, and workers in the political work in Egypt are calling for merging them together in a smaller and stronger number, which was proposed by President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi more than once.

University student Haitham says that he only hears the "Future of the Nation" party through its charitable activities, which ridicule the media, as it distributes food and blankets to the poor, in order to mobilize them for the activities that the authority wants.

In turn, the young teacher, Safaa, confirms that she only knows the "Future of the Homeland" party, which has a car belonging to him in the fields to sell cheap meat to the citizens, in addition to a party called "Protectors of the homeland" you know because her eyes are sometimes located on a sign near him to her house.

The two agree that they do not feel any political role for the parties, unlike what was the case after the January revolution, when the political momentum was at its peak, and there are battles on the ground between the officials of those parties and great competition, but now the existence of these parties is like their lack thereof, and no one will feel if It disappeared from the surface of political life in Egypt.

A government threat

Since the military coup in the summer of 2013, the political role of most Egyptian parties has been lacking, as the Freedom and Justice Party of the Muslim Brotherhood has been dissolved, and other Islamic parties are facing multiple pressures, including lawsuits demanding their dissolution.

Gradually, the rest of the parties became merely "paper parties", a term used by the Egyptians since the era of the late President Hosni Mubarak, to describe parties with no influence, whose role is limited to legal presence through official papers and addresses.

But there are 18 of them, in particular, that are under the guillotine of the threat of dissolution. In a letter issued by the Committee for Party Affairs, it was stated that the leaders of 18 parties should be notified of the Central Auditing Authority's comments on these parties and their activities.

Among the comments received are the vacancy of the position of the president in some parties, the end of the president’s mandate for other parties, and the existence of conflicts in a number of them, which necessitates the importance of regularizing their status, especially with regard to the lack of budgets of other parties that show the value of the size of their financial resources and expenditures.

The committee demanded that these parties provide legal responses through their leaders to fill the legal void in accordance with the law on parties.

Concern of the parties

Politicians affiliated with these parties fear that this will be a step towards getting rid of them, in preparation for other steps in political life.

The head of the "Egypt 2000" party, Ramadan Al-Aqsari, said that the report of the CAA based on the committee's decision is "doubtful", as it does not explain in detail the reasons on which he relied, in addition to being "unfamiliar with the reality of the case, and aims to raise confusion and skepticism in existing parties strongly Constitution and law. "

Al-Aqsari pointed out that he contacted some of the leaders of the political parties mentioned in the report, and it was agreed that the accountability system has nothing to do with the party’s leadership, but his work is focused only on examining the existing party’s budget in accordance with the constitution, whether it is contested over its chairmanship or not.

Al-Aqsari criticized the report's neglect of the state of all 104 Egyptian parties, and only targeting 18 of them, as if they alone were the offense, despite the presence of other parties not mentioned in the report, and they have old disputes, and others that their leaders left without an alternative.

Traditional procedure

A former leader of the Liberal Party - one of the parties targeted by the decision of the Committee on Parties Affairs and one of the oldest parties - believes that this decision is traditional, where every time the Committee of Parties issues a decision regarding parties that suffer from internal crises, and does not represent any concern for political life.

The leader told Al-Jazeera Net that the tragedy of the Al-Ahrar Party extends to before the January 2011 revolution, as many disputes arose over his leadership between his leaders following the death of its founder, Mustafa Kamel Murad.

The leader - who declined to be named - stressed that political life in Egypt suffers from stagnation and stagnation in general, due to "strangling power in the public sphere, which makes party work ineffective, given the public's reluctance to do so, because it understands that all these parties will not be able to deviate from the role The decree is from the authority, and the guillotine awaits those who try to practice politics seriously. "

Magdy Hamdan, Vice-President of the Democratic Front Party, agreed with the opinion, stressing that the committee's speech is routine and will only result in the situation remaining as it is, even though some of the parties mentioned in the committee's decision have deputies in Parliament, such as the Congress Party, the Arab Nasserite Party, and the party the gathering.

In his interview with Al-Jazeera Net, Hamdan excludes the poor intention of the authority towards the parties with the aim of abolishing them or merging them, because the law stipulates that one of the roles of the Parties Committee is concerned with receiving comments from the Accountability Authority, and sends violations to the party.

Hamdan pointed out that the control of the Central Auditing Agency is not a political issue, but rather a regular and periodic, where his delegate goes every period to the main headquarters of these parties, and in the case of these parties, delegates often do not find anyone in these headquarters, because there are disputes over their chairmanship, or for not choosing a new president for them .

Party blockade The
spokesman asserts that the Party Affairs Committee cannot compel any party to dissolve itself or merge, but the committee’s decision is often to continuously freeze activity until conditions are reconciled with a general conference, or the party’s general secretariat responds to the organ’s observations.

And he is not afraid of anyone the reason for the actual stalemate that the other parties suffer from, for reasons known to all - according to Hamdan - in reference to the state of siege experienced by the parties wishing to initiate activity, and the members ’fear of being exposed to what politicians have tried to do activities that they are not satisfied with Power, as in the case of the "Alliance of Hope" whose members were arrested, most of whom are members of official parties when they attempted to form a political alliance in preparation for the upcoming parliamentary elections.