CAIRO - Rivalry for Egypt’s rule has gathered speed after supporters of President Hosni Mubarak’s son entered the fray by spreading posters of the 47-year-old ruling party politician on the streets, particularly in poor areas, in order to give the impression that it is the poor, which form the wide base of society, who want Mubarak the junior to take over.
His supporters have even announced plans to gather signatures from ordinary citizens in support of the former banker who presides over the Policies Committee, a pivotal office in the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) that makes policy recommendations for the Government, and said they would go Online with their campaign, which targets millions of signatures.
“We’ll go to all governorates in a matter of a few days,” said Magdy el-Kurdy, the main organiser of the pro-Gamal campaign. “We aim to gather 100,000 signatures in the first week,” he added in statements to the press.
A dismissed member of the opposition Unionist Progressive Party, el-Kurdy who is little known to many in Egypt, has come to steer the show favouring Gamal for Egypt’s presidency over the past few weeks.
His campaign adds yet more fuel to the simmering coals of the opposition, who mostly rallies behind the former chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency Mohamed ElBaradei who lobbies for constitutional reforms in Egypt.
A special group of people supporting ElBaradei are gathering signatures from the public as well to pressure the Government into amending the Constitution, which according to the opposition, allows only a limited group of people to run for president.
“The important thing now is to pave the way for the presence of guarantees for democratic transformation in Egypt,” said Moustafa el-Nagar, an activist in charge of collecting signatures for ElBaradei. “We’re not talking about particular individuals here,” he added.
On the streets of many of Cairo’s poor areas, the posters of Gamal Mubarak, the handsome son of the President, can be found with the words “Egypt’s Gamal” written on them.
The Government must have okayed the campaign because the presence of these posters necessitated co-ordination with the Interior Ministry, opposition figures say.
The ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), however, denies that it is involved in el-Kurdy’s posters.
“The campaign is an individual act. The ruling party has nothing to do with it,” Mohamed Kamal, the secretary of training and political education in the NDP, said.
Opposition figure Ayman Nour, 46, who finished a distant second to President Mubarak in the country’s first contested presidential election in 2005, started a campaign countering the pro-Gamal campaign.
He said on Sunday he would start touring the neighborhoods where the posters are posted, warning people of the dangers of hereditary succession in Egypt.
While the campaign in support of junior Mubarak gathers more steam, the NDP continues to pour the bulk of its anger on ElBaradei by calling his constitutional reform demands “illogical”.
Ali Eddin Helal, the chairman of the Media Committee at the ruling party, says the Constitution cannot be amended because a limited group of people just wants that.
ElBaradei’s supporters, however, are in the hundreds of thousands now. His campaign has just announced that it has collected a quarter of a million signatures in addition to 100,000 others before.
