CAIRO, 20 September 2004 — Egypt’s ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) is expected to confirm at its annual convention this week the rise of Gamal Mubarak as the political heir apparent of his father, President Hosni Mubarak.
The president’s 41-year-old son is poised to boost his powers at the three-day conference which opens Tuesday. The elder Mubarak has been at the helm ever since he succeeded assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981.
Gamal Mubarak has for the past two years headed the powerful “higher political committee” of the NPD, a policy-making post which many have predicted would serve as a springboard toward the presidency.
He has since emerged at the forefront of a new guard which has inspired the party to take steps toward liberal reforms.
The political committee’s influence was underlined by the naming of seven of its members to government posts in July: investment, finance, communications, youth, higher education, national education, and industry and commerce.
After the economy, the reform-minded government of Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif and the NDP is due this year to put the spotlight on education and political reforms, without rocking the established order.
The opposition, for its part, has kept up its demands for the powers of the head of state to be scaled down and for the president to be elected by universal suffrage rather than in parliament.
Egyptian political analysts expect the convention to produce no dramatic changes but rather to continue the process of whittling down the role of the old guard in the ruling party. A “Young Generations Foundation” set up by Gamal Mubarak would benefit from any such development.
His supporters reject any comparison with Bashar Assad’s rise to the presidency in Syria after the death of his father Hafez, preferring comparisons to the Kennedy or Bush political dynasties in the United States. But first Hosni Mubarak, 76, who has suffered health problems this year, is expected to run for a fifth presidential term in 2005. His candidacy would be endorsed by the Senate in May and put to a referendum five months later.
In July, Mubarak spent more than two weeks in a German hospital where he underwent surgery for a slipped disc. Last November, he was forced to interrupt a keynote speech to parliament after what officials called a bout of flu.
The promotion of Gamal Mubarak as heir apparent was launched last week in a long article in the new weekly newspaper Al-Mustaqbal Al-Gadeed (New Future).
The younger Mubarak was not only “his father’s son” but “an ordinary Egyptian, a man of new ideas, enlightened, competent, far removed from nepotism and the centers of power, not a military man,” it said.
He is a “balanced man who harbors no hatred or malice for personal ends, a strong personality who has the capacity to manage” the affairs of state.
“Gamal Mubarak is the only one on the political scene” with these qualities and, “even if he should refuse the post (of president), our role is to convince him to accept,” wrote the paper’s director, Ahmed Rashden.
But in January, Hosni Mubarak put down persistent rumors that he was grooming Gamal to take over the presidency after him.
“This is nonsense... the regime in Egypt is republican, there is no hereditary transfer of powert,” Mubarak said.
Mubarak has never named a vice president, the route he and his predecessor Sadat took to become head of state. Like Egypt’s first president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, both Mubarak and Sadat rose from the army ranks.
