A major step backwards in Egypt, on the eve of Presidential elections. Grim signs abound.
Egypt’s highest court has dissolved parliament claiming a third of the seats were illegally contested. This potentially will also eliminate the from runner presidential candidate, from the Muslim Brotherhood, who’s nomination relied on his party’s position in parliament, and line up Ahmed Shafiq, a Hosni Mubarak henchman, to become president of a military-led government.
How will the people react?
CAIRO — Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court on Thursday ruled that the Islamist-led Parliament must be immediately dissolved, while also blessing the right of Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister to run for president, escalating a battle for power between the remnants of the toppled order and rising Islamists.
The high court, packed with sympathizers of the ousted president, appears to be engaged in a frontal legal assault on the Muslim Brotherhood, the once outlawed organization whose members swept to power in Parliament this spring and whose candidate was the front-runner for the presidency as well. The presidential election runoff is scheduled to go ahead Saturday and Sunday.
The ruling — which critics said amounted to a back-door coup — means that whoever emerges as the winner of the runoff scheduled for this weekend will take power without the check of a sitting Parliament and could even exercise some influence over the election of a future Parliament. It vastly compounds the stakes in the presidential race, raises questions about the ruling military council’s commitment to democracy, and makes uncertain the future of a constitutional assembly recently formed by the Parliament as well.
The decision, which dissolves the first freely elected Parliament in Egypt in decades, supercharges a building conflict between the court, which is increasingly presenting itself as a check on Islamists’ power, and the Muslim Brotherhood.