Egypt's ruling party revamps image for poll

CAIRO, Egypt (Reuters) -- Egypt's ruling party launched its campaign for October-November parliamentary elections this week hoping to shake off an image of corruption and aloofness.

Parliament watchers say the National Democratic Party (NDP) aims to project a clean, modern image in contrast to the name for graft, cronyism and indifference that some of its MPs acquired after the last polls for the People's Assembly in 1995.

"We do not want 'occasional' members of parliament. We want people who understand the nation's problems and live among their constituents," President Hosni Mubarak, who is NDP chairman, told a party meeting on Wednesday.

Four NDP deputies were among 31 people convicted in June for misuse of public money in a banking loan scam and several other NDP parliamentarians have been dogged by scandal since 1995.

A party shake-up began earlier this year when Mubarak appointed his banker son Gamal to its secretariat with a mandate to modernize the NDP's image and inject some youth appeal.

Last year, Gamal Mubarak was at the center of speculation that he might form an alternative party to the near-monolithic NDP with official approval, but the talk eventually fizzled.

Nehal Shoukry, who monitors NDP affairs at the state's flagship al-Ahram newspaper, said senior party officials had objected to the idea, preferring to revamp the NDP itself.

"He (Gamal) is leading the party's election promotion around the country," Shoukry said. "There is a new spirit."

ELECTION JUGGERNAUT

When candidate registration kicked off on Thursday, the NDP was the only party to field a full list for all 444 seats to be contested in three rounds of polling in October and November.

What is more, many NDP members who failed to secure the party's nomination will be running as independents, even though the NDP leadership has threatened them with expulsion.

Ex-NDP independents who won seats in the 1995 election were swiftly welcomed back into the party fold afterwards.

The candidate list gives the NDP a more youthful, populist profile in an electoral system shaped by Nasserist socialism that reserves half the seats for "workers and peasants."

Of 186 new faces, 100 are aged 30 to 42. Only one member of the last parliament was under 40 years old when elected -- and he was from the liberal opposition Wafd Party.

Only seven NDP candidates are businessmen, who as a class tended to attract bad publicity in the outgoing assembly.

Three come from Egypt's Coptic Christian minority and 11 are women, compared to seven women and no Copts in 1995. The Wafd Party is running at least nine Copts.

Intriguingly, the list includes 75 union leaders. Shoukry said this would preserve NDP influence in formerly state-owned companies sold under Egypt's privatization programme.

She said in past elections public sector companies would bus workers to polling stations with informal instructions to vote for government candidates, a system threatened by the sell-offs.

"The 75 new faces from the unions are meant to make up for selling public sector companies," Shoukry said.

The NDP is fielding 45 lawyers, 35 university professors and 30 engineers, reflecting what Shoukry said was a desire to show the party can match Islamist influence among the educated elite.

The banned Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's largest and most influential fundamentalist group, took control of many professional associations, or syndicates, in the late 1980s.

ILLUSION OF POPULARITY

Despite the cosmetic efforts, analysts say the NDP's real strength derives less from any genuine mass appeal than from a political system heavily loaded in the party's favor.

It was created by the late President Anwar Sadat when he introduced limited multiparty democracy in 1978, as a successor to his predecessor Gamal Abdel Nasser's Arab Socialist Union.

"It's not a political movement in any real sense. It just combines elements with access to power, money, family loyalty and community influence," said political analyst Mohamed Said.

"There is no ideology. It's a virtual party, an extension of the bureaucracy," he argued.

Opposition parties, which complained of blatant rigging in the 1995 vote, hope the introduction of judicial monitoring will help them grab more than the paltry 13 seats they took then.

A July court ruling forced the government to ensure that for the first time judges will supervise polling across Egypt.

But opposition parties remain weak and small, with some saying they are victims of official harassment.

The Wafd, the ruling party before Nasser's 1952 revolution overthrew the monarchy, has put up only 145 candidates so far.

Prosecutors this week began questioning Ibrahim Shukri, leader of the already suspended Labor Party, over the party's informal links with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Wafd and the Brotherhood-backed Labor Party are the only groups able to field large numbers of anti-NDP candidates.

"The suffocation of party life in the country over the last 10 years has created a general trend of apathy. People just don't care about or know the parties," Said said.

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