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Egypt opposition leader applies to challenge Mubarak
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Egypt opposition leader applies to challenge Mubarak
Egyptian opposition leader Ayman Nour on Friday applied to stand against President Hosni Mubarak in presidential elections on September 7, arriving early in the hope of having his name at the top of the ballot papers.
Ayman Nour, leader of the liberal Ghad (Tomorrow) Party, told Reuters his group was the first to turn up at the headquarters of the Presidential Election Commission when it opened to receive nomination papers in the morning.
But he failed to obtain any assurance that the names would be listed in the order in which candidates submitted their papers or even that they would be in alphabetical order, he said. In Arabic, Nour would come before Mubarak alphabetically.
Mubarak announced on Thursday he would stand for a fifth six-year term as leader of the Arab world?s most populous nation, in the first presidential elections ever with more than one candidate. The politburo of the ruling National Democratic Party endorsed the nomination by consensus later in the day.
Nour is expected to be his most prominent opponent but after decades of authoritarian government and state domination of the domestic media, analysts say he has no chance of winning.
Police arrested Nour in January and he is on trial on forgery charges which he says are meant to discredit his elections campaign. The next session of the trial will not take place until Sept. 25, after the elections.
The rules exclude a candidate from the Muslim Brotherhood, the influential Islamist organisation thought to be the largest single opposition group in the country.
Nour said he had provisionally chosen a bee as his election symbol and that Marei had promised him that a judge would supervise every ballot box in the country on Sept. 7.
The state news agency MENA said that Osama Shaltout of the little-known Takaful (Solidarity) Party also submitted his nomination papers on Friday.
Some of the big parties, including the leftist Tagammu and the Arab nationalist Nasserite Party, have decided to boycott the elections, on the grounds that the authorities have given insufficient assurances that voting will be free and fair.
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