The Fate of El Ghad
By Moheb Zaki

Until recently, the Egyptian Committee in charge of licensing political parties had never in its 25 year history granted any party a license to join the official polity without judicial intervention However, ten months ago this trend ended with the acceptance of the El Ghad ("Tomorrow") Party into the opposition.

Headed by its dynamic, 40-year old leaderAyman Nour, El Ghad quickly gained prominence among the opposition parties due to its unambiguous, liberal-democratic ideals and its criticism of the current regime's authoritarianism and corruption. As a result, Nour himself gained a reputation as the new champion of radical reform as a daring protagonist who did not mince words or try to curry favor with the regime. In the context of this rising popularity as an opposition figure, Nour was abruptly arrested on January 29, 2005 as he left a late parliamentary session. The government accused him of submitting forged documents to help establish his party, a charge which Nour categorically rejects, claiming that these trumped up charges were concocted by the government to silence him.

Nour's arrest and the reaction it provoked in the Western media brought him to even greater prominence by casting him as the major opposition leader to the incumbent regime. In addition to the domestic clamor following his imprisonment (for 44 days during his questioning by the prosecution), international protest included the U.S. State Department's sharply critical response to what it considered repressive measures by the Egyptian government to silence a formidable political opponent. When the Egyptian government showed no inclination to comply promptly and release Nour, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice canceled a previously planned visit to Egypt. Finally bowing to international and domestic pressure, the governing Egyptian regime released Nour a few weeks later pending trial, in time for him to run as one of the nine opposition candidates in the first-ever contested presidential elections, held on September 7, 2005 in which Mubarak won 88.8% of the votes and Nour came in second with 7%.

Despite notable promise, Nour's disappointing performance in the election cast doubt on both him and his party, which is beginning to exhibit symptoms of the malaise that afflicts all the opposition parties in Egypt: internal organizational disarray, the absence of a clear and practical platform that addresses the country's problems, and a monopoly of power by the party leader. These ailments, exacerbated by meager resources, have effectively paralyzed all opposition parties, reducing their activities to merely publishing party newspapers, and now the El Ghad party is in danger of falling victim to the same illness.

The fragmentation and potential demise facing the Ghad party provokes a sense of deja vu. At least three other parties have already passed through this splintering process and fallen out of the political arena: Misr-el-Fatah, Al-Ahrar, Al-'Amal, and, more recently, the Arab Nasserist Party, which suffers severe internal fractionalization and is likely to follow the other three into oblivion. In each of these cases, the disintegration process followed a nearly identical pattern that played itself out in the following three stages.

The first stage begins with a series of investigative reports published in the party's newspaper exposing corruption within the higher echelons of the ruling elites and attacking the incompetence of the government. This broad campaign usually increases the circulation of the paper and gives greater political prominence to the party's leader while agitating the regime and straining the limits of its tolerance, usually to the point where the government brings a libel or criminal charge against one or more of the leaders of the party. Within a few months, the second stage opens with serious, albeit suppressed, divisions within the leadership of the party. Soon, under the stress of the court trials and government pressures, the divisions among the party leadership break out into the open, with accusations of violations of the party's charter, economic malfeasance, and misguided policies. During the third and final stage, each of the two main factions expels the other from the party and submits to the Political Parties Committee briefs to that effect, demanding that it alone be officially recognized by the authorities as the valid leadership of the party. In all past cases, the Committee has simply suspended the license of the Party pending examination of the claims and counter claims by a special legal panel, a process that has so far proved to be interminable.

The El Ghad party is now in the midst of the second phase. Ayman Nour is currently being tried, together with one of his assistants, on a charge of forging documents. In the meantime, his two principal deputies have convened a general assembly of sorts that passed a resolution banishing Nour from the party, while Nour has countered by convening an even larger assembly that expelled the two renegade deputies. factionalism within El Ghad party that has even turned violent at times, as evinced by a near brawl during one of Nour's court sessions. With its leader on trial and its constituency at war, the fledgling El Ghad party's future does not look bright unless it can break out of the fractionalization process in which it is currently embroiled.