Egyptian front-runner would modify Israel treaty
Former Egyptian FM Amr Moussa leads presidential race; Brotherhood says it has support to appoint assembly speaker.
Cairo will likely maintain its peace treaty with Israel but in modified form, Egypt’s leading presidential candidate said this week. Amr Moussa said regulations for troop deployments in Sinai and Egypt’s sale of natural gas to Israel could be expected to undergo revisions in the post-Hosni Mubarak era.
On Sunday a member of Egypt’s ruling military council said the presidential nomination process would start on April 15, with voting beginning in June.
Voting for the lower house of parliament has already finished, but full results have yet to be announced because votes in some areas are going to be run again. Still, the broad result of the staggered election that began in November is already clear, with Islamists taking roughly 70 percent of the vote in the lower house and similar results expected in the upper chamber.
An official from the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) said Sunday that several leading parties are backing a senior figure from the Islamist group to be assembly speaker.
The FJP, which secured the biggest bloc in the parliamentary election, is proposing its Secretary-General Mohamed al-Katatni for the speaker post, party head Mohamed Morsi said after the parties met.
Under the agreement reached between the main parties, which included non-religious and Islamists groups, the two deputy speaker posts would go to the Salafist al-Nour party, the runner-up in the vote, and the nationalist Wafd party, another group with substantial support.
Moussa is the clear frontrunner in polls for president, garnering 39% of votes in the latest nationwide survey conducted in November (his closest competitor was Ahmed Shafiq, a former prime minister, who received 13% of the vote).
In an extensive interview this week with pan-Arab newspaper Asharq al-Awsat, the former foreign minister and Arab League chief outlined his vision for Egypt’s future.
Moussa said he would uphold the will of the people, even if parliamentary elections signal a majority of Egyptians support religiously oriented parties.