egypt: mubarak permits opposition to run
In a positive Middle East development today, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has permitted candidates to run against him in the next presidential election.
ROME, Feb. 26 — Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, under pressure at home and abroad to democratize, said Saturday that he would ask his country’s parliament to change the constitution and permit multiparty popular elections.
“The election of a president will be through direct, secret balloting, giving the chance for political parties to run for the presidential elections and providing guarantees that allow more than one candidate for the people to choose among them with their own will,” Mubarak said in a televised speech at Menoufia University in the Nile Delta.
Mubarak, 76, said the decision was rooted in his “full conviction of the need to consolidate efforts for more freedom and democracy.”
The surprise move could result in a historic shift for Egypt, which Mubarak has ruled for 24 years. He is nearing the end of his fourth term, and observers had expected him to seek another under Egypt’s system, in which citizens vote “yes” or “no” on a single presidential candidate proposed by a parliament that is dominated by Mubarak’s National Democratic Party.
Opposition demands for a competitive election have been building for months, while President Bush has made democratic reform in the Middle East one of his stated policy priorities.
Mubarak’s speech followed a decision this week by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to cancel a visit to Egypt, a move attributed to the lack of reform initiatives there. Egypt had also jailed Ayman Nour, leader of a newly authorized political party and proponent of multi-candidate elections. The State Department criticized Nour’s Jan. 29 arrest and suggested that Mubarak had no intention of loosening his hold on power.
The United States provides Egypt with about $2 billion in annual foreign aid. Bush has singled out Egypt along with Saudi Arabia as ripe for reform. In his State of the Union address, Bush said that “Egypt, which showed the way toward peace in the Middle East, can now show the way toward democracy in the Middle East.”
It appears that President Bush and his advisers are not the stupid chimpy rednecks they (and I) are often made out to be. Pro-democracy protests in Lebanon, elections in Iraq, elections in Egypt, hints of peace in Israel, mumblings in Iran… the tide of freedom is turning.
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