Excerpts

As Egypt braces for the upcoming parliamentary elections, which begin in phases starting in mid-October, the debate about the participation of religious parties is making a powerful comeback.

According to Article 74 of the 2014 constitution, drafted after the toppling of the Muslim Brotherhood government, political parties cannot be established on religious, ethnic, sectarian, or geographical basis.

Salah Abdel Maaboud, member of the higher committee of the Salafi al-Nour Party, one of the parties targeted by the campaign, argued that since only the court can disband a party, the campaign is pointless. “Is the judiciary expected to be influenced by the number of signatures?” he said in the same interview. “If the campaign is using signatures to prove that people don’t want us, why don’t we wait till elections prove that? Isn’t this what democracy is about?”

Former jihadist Amal Abdel Wahab noted that the campaign against religious parties made a grave mistake. “They offered religious parties, especially al-Nour, a golden opportunity to abort their attempts through using Article 2 and even started a counter-campaign,” he told the Egyptian news website al-Bawaba News. Abdel Wahab argued that the campaign should not have used the argument that those parties are religious. “They should have rather focused on the history of those parties, their thirst for power, their hidden agendas, and their former alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood.”