{"id":18599,"date":"2024-04-28T16:48:41","date_gmt":"2024-04-28T14:48:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/?p=18599"},"modified":"2026-10-09T01:56:30","modified_gmt":"2026-10-08T23:56:30","slug":"tantawi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/tantawi\/","title":{"rendered":"The “Hope Current” Collides with “Security Obstacles”: Will Tantawy Succeed in Founding His Party?"},"content":{"rendered":"

On 23 April, the Matariya Misdemeanours Court<\/a> suspended the appeal of Mohamed Abu El-Diyar, campaign manager for Ahmed Tantawy, the candidate who was prevented from running in the last presidential election and former head of the Karama Party, against his prison sentence, pending a decision on the request to recuse the court panel.<\/p>\n

The defence of Mohamed Abu El-Diyar, Tantawy’s election campaign manager, had requested the recusal of the court panel, and the court decided to adjourn the case to take the recusal procedures.<\/p>\n

Last February, an Egyptian court sentenced<\/a> the prominent politician and his campaign manager to one year in prison, with EGP 20,000 bail to temporarily suspend the sentence, and barred Tantawy from running in parliamentary elections for five years. It also sentenced 21 campaign members to one year in prison with labour, in the case known in the media as the popular endorsements case. According to the referral order, the charges include participating in and inciting the printing and use of an electoral document without a licence, while the prosecution charged the other defendants with printing and circulating those documents.<\/p>\n

Its events began with the opening of the issuing of popular endorsements<\/a> to citizens at the notary offices, as Tantawy’s supporters were prevented from reaching the offices and faced severe difficulties that amounted to physical assaults, repression and later arrest.<\/p>\n

Read also:<\/strong> The Road to the Ballot Box Is Paved with Trials… Tantawy Joins the List of Defendants<\/a><\/p>\n

This led to Tantawy being prevented from completing the presidential election race, as the campaigns of restriction and obstruction resulted in the required endorsements not being collected (Egypt’s presidential election law requires a presidential candidate to obtain the endorsement of 20 members of the House of Representatives or 25,000 citizens from 15 governorates, with a minimum of 1,000 endorsements from each governorate). On 13 October last year, Tantawy and his campaign announced they had collected about 14,000 endorsements, at the press conference at which he announced his exit from the presidential race.<\/p>\n

His failure to make the list of candidates in the presidential election was no obstacle to the young politician’s ambition: at the same press conference, he announced his intention to launch a political organisation, and on 26 October last year he announced, via the campaign’s Facebook page, an opinion poll<\/a> that included campaign members and the parties that supported him, as well as a number of public figures. The consultations, as he announced in his statement, resulted in approval to found the “Hope Current” party, which transcends political ideology and is open in its membership to all who believe in safe, peaceful change under the umbrella of the law and the constitution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to the opinion poll<\/a> Tantawy announced at the time, of 18,028 citizens, 93.5% agreed to turn the campaign into a political party, 92.3% agreed that the party should transcend ideologies, 62.6% expressed readiness to join the party, and 57.9% supported starting the party’s founding procedures now, against 36% who voted to postpone the step until after the end of the war on the Gaza Strip.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

From that date, the party began receiving founding endorsements from members wishing to join, and it also began preparing to enter the political arena.<\/p>\n

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Obstructing the Party’s Founding and Preventing Endorsements<\/h3>\n

Last January, just 24 hours after Tantawy announced the founding statement<\/a> of his party, the Hope Current, security forces arrested three citizens who had issued endorsements to establish the party.<\/p>\n

Lawyer Mohamed Abu El-Diyar<\/strong>, a member of the party’s founding committee and formerly Tantawy’s election campaign manager, tells Zawia3<\/strong> that the nascent party faces security challenges in collecting establishment endorsements, which may obstruct its founding in the near future. Under the Political Parties Law<\/a>, a party needs to gather five thousand citizens from ten different governorates, and what the party has collected has not reached 1,000 endorsements so far.<\/p>\n

Abu El-Diyar explains that citizens wishing to issue endorsements for the party face obstruction in every way, starting with procedural complications such as notary offices refusing to issue endorsements to citizens in governorates other than the one where their residence is registered, and designating only two offices in each governorate to issue endorsements for founding parties, which makes things difficult for citizens. This is in addition to harassment of citizens that may extend to arresting them, which happened with some young people who had issued an endorsement on the presidential candidacy form and then insisted on issuing an endorsement for the party, as well as the Canal governorates (Suez, Ismailia and Port Said), along with South and North Sinai, preventing endorsements from being issued for the party.<\/p>\n

He explains: We went to the Political Parties Affairs Committee to try to submit a request stating that we had begun founding the party, in order to obtain the legal cover of being a party (under formation), so that we could start meeting supporters to consult on the party’s programme, vision and goals. But this too is heavily restricted: last Ramadan the party tried to organise a group iftar in a number of governorates, with a controlled attendance of no more than 20 people in each governorate, but this was met with the arrest of all the participants in the group iftar in almost every governorate. He stresses that despite all the restrictive and prohibitive practices, “the party exists and has its committees, such as the outreach, education and legal support committees, as well as the media committee, which works seriously and extensively to communicate with the public through social media channels”.<\/p>\n

Abu El-Diyar notes that the number of those affiliated with the Hope Current party who have been arrested has so far exceeded 150 since the start of the election campaign, in addition to four citizens arrested after the solidarity protest in front of the Journalists’ Syndicate in early April.<\/p>\n

Security forces had arrested 18 citizens after a protest called for by activists and journalists under the slogan “Bread and Water” in solidarity with the siege and war suffered by the Palestinian people in Gaza. After three days of detention, 14 of them were released, while 4 citizens belonging to the Hope Current party remained in detention, according to Abu El-Diyar, who points out that the party has provided legal support to all detainees from the start of the campaign until now.<\/p>\n

Read also:<\/strong> They Chanted Against Al-Organi: New Detainees After the Journalists’ Syndicate Protest in Support of Gaza<\/a><\/p>\n

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An Opposition That Is an Alternative to the Authorities<\/h3>\n

On the party’s political position, media figure Rasha Kandil, media secretary of the Hope Current party and a member of its founding committee, says the Hope Current party has offered an opportunity to create a civil democratic alternative for governing and managing Egypt, despite all the attempts at security siege, political encirclement and exhaustion through human attrition, by directly and indirectly targeting members or even supporters of the party and its cadres, among them the founders’ representative Ahmed Tantawy, who insists on continuing his political path, committed to the law and the constitution and to evaluating the authorities’ performance at all levels. She adds that “the authorities have proven an abject failure in performance, implementation and planning”.<\/p>\n

Kandil points to the party’s foresight of the dangers of obfuscation and lack of transparency with Egyptians, in addition to the domestication of state institutions and their subjection to direct authoritarian orders without oversight or independence.<\/p>\n

As for the Hope Current’s position on the Civil Movement, she adds: “We clearly want the Civil Movement to consider the opposition an alternative to the authorities, not subordinate to them, in partnership with voters. We do not want to dwell on the mistakes of the past but to learn from them; however, those who enter into sham partnerships with the authorities and move within the spaces and margins they allow should not present themselves as an alternative to the authorities.” She stresses that the Hope Current party and its founders have not rejected dialogue and partnerships as long as they do not amount to outbidding its firm position on violations of rights and freedoms, mismanagement and corruption.<\/p>\n

Kandil adds that Tantawy refused from the outset for the party to be part of political plays that do not rise to genuine dialogue or to efforts to empower any oversight tools, including political oversight of national decisions and those related to foreign policy.<\/p>\n

She went on: “The Civil Movement did not extend a hand to us that we then rejected. But we will not bow to pressure to achieve illusory gains within a contrived scene drawn by the authorities, perhaps to give the outside world the illusion of civil, political or rights activity, or even to maintain the stagnation that amounts to political death in Egypt, especially since the illusion of providing space for political participation has been proven to fail as a policy to contain the authorities or even share their decision-making”.<\/p>\n

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The Hope Current and the Parliamentary Elections<\/h3>\n

The media secretary of the Hope Current party (under formation) resumes, saying: We seek to build political cadres and welcome cadres from outside it, to create electoral partnerships in the upcoming parliamentary elections, because the party believes there is no real political life without a parliament capable of legislating and of studying and evaluating decisions before and after their implementation. She points to “the experience founders’ representative Ahmed Tantawy has in parliamentary work”, as he was an MP for five years at a time when fateful decisions with consequences were taken, such as the Tiran and Sanafir issue, the constitutional amendments, the economic vision that came with the Extended Fund Facility agreement with the International Monetary Fund, and dozens of political and legal laws that founded a one-man state as opposed to a state of law and institutions, which squandered the foundations of the homeland and wasted citizens’ rights, until it monopolised all decisions and encroached on the powers of the three branches of government.<\/p>\n

Kandil concludes her remarks to Zawia3 by saying that Egyptian political life will only return when powers return to their legislative, judicial and executive institutions, when the country moves from a state of intimidation back to a state of law, and when the attrition and exhaustion of Egypt’s political and civil communities through escalating judicial and security targeting stop.<\/p>\n

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It Is in the State’s Interest for the Masses to Organise<\/h3>\n

Commenting on the idea of founding the Hope Current party and the future of Tantawy and his political group, Karima El-Hefnawy, the Egyptian Socialist Party’s representative in the Civil Democratic Movement, believes that the existence of any political party will add to Egyptian party life and opposition, given its political, economic and social orientations and views.<\/p>\n

She adds: This party will either be accepted by wide sections of the public, depending on its programme and its leaders’ ability to win citizens’ trust, or not; this depends on what the party offers the public, and the public joining any political party is its asset in any electoral contest.<\/p>\n

El-Hefnawy explains that founding any party is a right granted by the constitution. This requires giving the founders opportunities to communicate with the public in all governorates so that they can collect the endorsements required to found it, pointing out that placing obstacles before the party and denying it its legal right is a continuation of repression and intimidation, and contradicts what is said about opening the public sphere and encouraging the public to engage in public work. She warns that “it is in the authorities’ interest for the masses to organise themselves, whether in parties, unions or otherwise, so that anger among the masses does not intensify and the matter reach the point of explosion”.<\/p>\n

The Civil Movement leader stresses that pressure and security restrictions are exerted on all political parties in Egypt, even established ones, and that the public sphere in general does not encourage pluralism and the formation of parties, but the Hope Current’s leaders have no choice but to keep trying in this repressive climate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Law No. 40 of 1977 on the Political Parties System stipulates Egyptians’ right to form political parties, and sets several conditions<\/a> for founding or continuing any political party, including: that the party have a name that is not identical or similar to the name of an existing party; that the party’s principles, goals, programme, policies or methods of conducting its activity not conflict with the basic principles of the constitution, the requirements of protecting Egyptian national security, or the preservation of national unity, social peace and the democratic system; in addition, that the party not be founded on a religious, class, sectarian, categorical or geographical basis or on the basis of sex, language, religion or creed; and that notification of the party’s founding be submitted in writing to the Parties Committee stipulated in Article 8 of the law, accompanied by the signatures of five thousand of its founding members.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

For his part, politician and human rights defender Mostafa Shawky believes that a broad sector of the public interested in Tantawy’s political project gives him trust conditional on how far he struggles to defend the detainees who were arrested, whether during his election campaign or during the endorsements battle, including those against whom a ruling was recently issued.<\/p>\n

He continues: “Since the end of the elections until now, Tantawy and his party have not taken any real steps to defend them, whether a press conference, a media campaign or appearing in videos to talk about the detainees and demand their release, and so far he has not provided them with real, tangible support”.<\/p>\n

Shawky points out that Tantawy is continuing on his path to build his political party and complete the political momentum created by the elections, “but as a result of his retreat and citizens’ natural fear of completing endorsements in the wake of security prosecutions, the process of founding the party has slowed, in addition to Tantawy’s considerable political withdrawal. Hence, so far he has become neither part of a struggle to build a new party nor part of a large campaign to release those imprisoned for working with him. Accordingly, with the political sphere tightly closed, the presence of a political current headed by Tantawy is very limited”.<\/p>\n

He adds: “If there were a different political context, Tantawy could then rebuild himself”, pointing out that what distinguished the prominent politician when the context and public sphere were closed was his higher ceiling compared with the opposition, and suggesting that if the public sphere opens, Tantawy’s high-ceiling discourse will be met by more radical discourses concerned with issues related to biases, such as women’s issues, minorities and national issues, and from there it will become clear whether Tantawy has a real project or not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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