ABSTRACT
The Egyptian political system continued to be dominated by President Ḥusnī Mubārak who was re-elected in October 1993 to a third six-year term of office. ‛Aṭif Ṣidqī, who had been appointed prime minister in 1986, remained in that office until 2 January 1996, and there was much continuity among the holders of key positions in his cabinets. Parliament continued to be dominated by the governing party, the National Democratic Party (NDP). The elections of 1987 were eventually ruled invalid by the supreme constitutional court and new elections (under a new electoral system) were held in November and December 1990 at the height of the Kuwayt crisis. The NDP won 348 seats compared with 346 in 1987 and retained its substantial majority. In fact the opposition in the new parliament was weaker than before. The main opposition parties boycotted the elections and although some of their members were elected as independents, the net result was that their voice was much less audible in the new assembly than it had been in the old. In particular, the Muslim Brothers, who had formed a substantial group in the 1987 parliament, were now without representation. The authority of the 1990 parliament was further limited by the circumstance that only 25 per cent of the electorate voted; its utility as a body in which some form of national consensus could be discovered or created was consequently reduced. Attempts to use the NDP to draw other parties into a national dialogue to consider future political reforms had no result, partly because of indecision whether the Muslim Brotherhood should be included in the dialogue or not. At the local level an attempt at liberalization was reversed. In 1986 a new system of electing village headmen (‛umdas) had been introduced but the reform had the result that the wrong people (from the viewpoint of government) were chosen, and so in 1994 it was decided to revert to the former system by which ‛umdas were appointed through the ministry of the interior. In the violent, government-controlled parliamentary elections of November/December 1995 the dominance of the NDP and the extinction of the Islamist opposition was confirmed: the NDP won 317 seats, the mainly secular opposition parties 23, and independents, most of them pro-government, 113. When the dust had settled the NDP controlled 416 out of 444 seats in the assembly.
