Cairo - Political parties from across Egypt's political spectrum threatened to boycott elections scheduled to start in November unless the country's military rulers amend the election law.
Parties made their boycott threat in a joint statement late on Wednesday as some activists prepared a protest in Cairo for Friday. They hope it will attract thousands of people unhappy with the generals who took over from veteran president Hosni Mubarak when he was forced out by popular protests in February.
But some Islamists, including the powerful Muslim Brotherhood, said they would not protest, giving the army time to respond. The army urged protesters to keep order.
The United States also put pressure on the interim government, saying it hoped Egypt's emergency law - widely seen as a tool of repression under Mubarak - would be scrapped sooner than the military foresees next year.
About 60 political parties and groups, including the political wing of the Brotherhood, have set a deadline of Sunday for the military council to meet their demands. These include approving a law that would effectively prevent many of those who supported Mubarak while he was in power from running for office.
Without it, the parties said they would not take part in the elections: “We will boycott if they have not responded positively to our demands by Sunday,” Sayyid al-Badawi, the head of the Wafd party, told Reuters.
The Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party is now the largest and best organised party in Egypt, since Mubarak's National Democratic Party was dissolved by court order.
The military council said on Tuesday that parliamentary elections would start in stages from November 28, and invited candidates to start registering for the poll from October 12.
Under rules approved by the council, which took over after Mubarak's overthrow, party lists may compete for two thirds of seats in parliament, to be allocated regionally by proportional representation, while the rest are constituency seats reserved for unaffiliated individual candidates.
Badawi said all the parties had agreed to the demands in the statement to allow parties to field candidates on both regional party lists and for individual constituency seats.
Egypt's military rulers said last week that the emergency law would remain in place until June next year, in keeping with a timeline set by Mubarak while he was trying to hold on to power in the face of mass demonstrations.
However, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for a faster end to the law, which was reactivated two days after a September 9 attack by protesters on the Israeli embassy in Cairo.
“We hope to see the law lifted sooner than that because we think that is an important step on the way to the rule of law and to the kind of system of checks and balances that are important in protecting the rights of the Egyptian people,” she said in Washington on Wednesday.
“We want to see this as soon as possible,” she told a news conference with Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohamed Kamel Amr.
Egyptian parties want the military council to activate a “Treason Law” issued in the 1950s to fight political corruption and abuse of office. In August, the government revived an amended version of the law, state news agency MENA reported. It was sent to the military council but has yet to be approved.
Under the law, any government official, member of parliament or minister may be punished for abuse of power if they, their relatives or acquaintances benefited from public office they held. Activists said the law would effectively bar many Mubarak loyalists from running for office for 10 years. - Reuters