Egypt to announce parliamentary elections schedule on Sunday

The date for the start of Egypt's long-awaited parliamentary polls will be announced at press conference this Sunday, the country's election committee said on Thursday. 

The committee will announce "when the vote will begin, the timetable for the poll, and conditions and time of candidacy," the committee's spokesman Omar Marawan told Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram.

The vote, previously scheduled for 22 March, was postponed after a court ruled that part of an electoral law was unconstitutional.

Parliamentary elections are the final step in a political roadmap that was announced after the July 2013 military coup toppling president Mohamed Morsi.

Egypt has been without a parliament since June 2012 when a court dissolved the House of Representatives after ruling it was not constitutionally elected. President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi has since wielded legislative powers.

Sisi has reportedly said that the elections would take place before the end of the year, but other officials have said the vote might be held as early as September, according to Al-Ahram Online.

Under a new law, criticised for opening the door to patronage-based politics, the House of Representatives will consist of 448 seats for individual candidates and 120 seats for party lists.

Several political parties have reportedly condemned the new electoral laws with opposition parties El-Dostour and Nasserist Karama announcing they will boycott the elections.

'No to religious parties' campaign

In recent weeks, another group, Tamarod has launched an anti-religious parties campaign in the run up to the elections.

Tamarod led a campaign to oust Morsi in 2013, claiming it had collected around 22 million signatures calling for his removal, but the group was later accused of being used by the military government.

Tamarod member Doaa Khalifa told Al-Ahram that the group aims to collect 23 million signatures in support of its latest campaign and has already collected 100,000 signatures from six different governorates, figures that could not be independently verified.

On Wednesday, Egypt's Ministry of Endowments came out in support campaign against ‘religious parties’, the ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.

Sabry Ebada, a ministry deputy, has said that the ministry supports the campaign, called ‘no to religious parties’, because parties with “religious foundations lead to discrimination among citizens on sectarian grounds," reported Al-Ahram Online.

Mohamed Abdel-Razeq, chairman of the ministry’s religion department, said that Article 74 of Egypt's constitution bans political parties based on religious grounds, reported Al-Ahram.

He added that the ministry will work to ensure that parliamentary candidates do not use religious slogans during the upcoming elections.

Since the military 2013 coup that toppled the Muslim Brotherhood-led government in Egypt, Sisi has been leading a fierce crackdown on religious parties and movements, specifically the Brotherhood with thousands of the group’s leaders either in exile or in prison.

Another group that has come under fire through the campaign is the Salafist Nour Party, the only Islamist-leaning party that supported Sisi’s toppling of Morsi in 2013. It has, however, been excluded from the violent crackdown on pro-Islamists activists across the country.

According to Al-Ahram, the campaign is mainly aimed at imposing a ban on the Salafist Nour Party ahead of the elections.

"I think everyone in this country knows quite well that Nour [party] is a religious party and that its ideology relies on the discrimination among citizens on religious and sectarian grounds,” Khalifa, the leader of Tamarod's campaign, told Al-Ahram Online.

Tamarod’s Hamdi Al-Fakharani added: "The Nour Party espouses the same ideology as the Muslim Brotherhood and all other extremist Islamist jihadist organisations like the Islamic State [IS] and it is very bad for political life in Egypt that members of this party could gain seats in parliament," he told Al-Ahram.

Meanwhile, an Egyptian court sentenced 12 alleged members of IS to death, reportedly for planning attacks against security forces, AFP reported.